Appellate Division Finds Warrantless Blood Draw Not Per Se Unconstitutional - State v. Jones
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Per the New Jersey Law Journal:
"A New Jersey appeals court has upended a trial judge’s suppression of blood evidence taken from a woman who caused an accident after getting behind the wheel with a blood-alcohol level of more than four times the legal limit.
"A New Jersey appeals court has upended a trial judge’s suppression of blood evidence taken from a woman who caused an accident after getting behind the wheel with a blood-alcohol level of more than four times the legal limit.
"The Appellate Division thwarted the defendant’s efforts to invoke the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling last year in Missouri v. McNeely, which held that dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream by itself isn’t enough to establish exigency in order to bypass the warrant requirement.
“'The fact that the Supreme Court rejected a per se exigency rule in McNeely should not be misinterpreted as a retreat from its recognition that the dissipation of alcohol in the blood merits considerable weight in a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis,' Appellate Division Judge Marianne Espinosa wrote in the published case, State v. Jones."
Full law journal article and text of decision after the jump...