In Push to Stop Drunk Driving, Police Draw Blood:
After police stopped Robert H. Miller for driving erratically here one afternoon in February 2001, they asked for his license and registration.
Then they asked for something else: his blood. Having been convicted of drunk driving once before, Mr. Miller refused to cooperate. So after he was taken to a hospital, five officers pinned him to the floor as a medical technician stuck a needle in his arm. His blood-alcohol level was 0.266% — more than twice the legal limit. Mr. Miller, who declined to comment, challenged the tactic in court but lost. He pleaded no contest, was sentenced to up to 90 days in jail and lost his license for 18 months.
In the past, police routinely asked suspected drunk drivers to blow into devices that extrapolated their blood’s alcohol content from their breath. Now, authorities in most states are taking blood, by force if necessary.
A blood-alcohol level of 0.266% is over three times the legal limit (0.08%) in many states — but not in Wisconsin. (Perhaps they’ve dropped the limit since 2001.)
There’s something more than a little creepy about forced blood testing:
Testimony in a federal suit last year shows that authorities in Las Vegas regularly obtain blood samples in the Clark County Detention Center. The suit involved a 1998 incident. Police found Terry Jones, then 33, asleep at the wheel of a parked car, an open Budweiser between his thighs. He was arrested, taken to the jail and ordered to submit to a blood test. Mr. Jones, who had two prior DUI convictions, put up a furious fight.
Guard Daniel Kresky testified that physical resistance to blood draws was a nightly event. Guards would use “whatever force is necessary,” he testified, typically handcuffing defendants’ arms behind their back, bending them over an examination table in the jail nurse’s office and holding them down. Sometimes, drivers were held on the floor. “We always got our blood,” he testified.
Mr. Jones, 270 pounds, tossed several officers off his back with a buck of his head. Two officers testified that another stood on and kicked Mr. Jones’s head; that officer denied the charge. Suddenly, Mr. Jones went limp. The coroner ruled that Mr. Jones died of acute cardiac arrhythmia, a heart-rhythm disturbance. But a second autopsy, performed by a retired deputy medical examiner at the request of Mr. Jones’s widow, found that his head had been beaten and his left eye crushed. “Had it not been for that trauma, he probably wouldn’t have died,” that doctor testified.
Last March, a jury ruled that police and jail officials weren’t responsible. Paul Martin, the jail’s chief, says it now uses a specially-made chair with Velcro straps to restrain drivers brought in for forced blood draws.
Encounters over drivers’ blood are beginning to give some judges second thoughts.
In a Rhode Island case, police in 1997 arrested a woman on suspicion of DUI after a car she was driving struck and killed a motorcyclist. She submitted to a breath test, which found only minimal alcohol, but she refused to give blood, so the police got a warrant. Her blood tested positive for marijuana and cocaine.
In pretrial litigation, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2000 that taking her blood without consent violated a provision in the state’s implied-consent law, which says that if a driver refuses to submit to a test, “none shall be given.” The court said the provision was meant to “prevent a violent confrontation between an arresting officer and a suspect unwilling to submit.” (The defendant later pleaded no contest to DUI resulting in death.) Some state lawmakers advocated changing the law to allow force, but the Legislature hasn’t done so.
A year later, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that police in Edgewater went too far when they pinned a screaming, struggling suspected drunk driver to a hospital table, strapped down his legs and left arm and held him while a nurse drew eight vials of blood, which indicated that he was drunk. The court didn’t bar the future use of force outright but said that under the circumstances the police used “unreasonable force.” Barred from using blood evidence, prosecutors retried the man, who was convicted based on police testimony that he seemed drunk.