Source : Denver Post
By : Kirk Mitchell
Category : Bail Bonds In Sanford , Bail Bonds In Seminole
Colorado Supreme Court upholds state’s DUI laws
The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld the state’s drunken driving statutes in three cases that had warrantless blood draw evidence thrown out by lower courts, including a case in which a suspect had five times the legal limit of alcohol in his bloodstream. “If this had been allowed to stand, it could have invalidated every breath or blood test that a driver in Colorado provides as part of a DUI investigation, which would obviously have huge ramifications,” said Arapahoe County deputy district attorney Jennifer Gilbert, who handled all three appeals. The three cases involved different elements of Colorado’s expressed consent law, according to a news release from Arapahoe County district attorney George Brauchler. The law says that by driving in Colorado, drivers consent to a blood or breath test to determine their blood alcohol content if the police have probable cause to believe that the driver has committed an alcohol-related driving offense.
In Fitzgerald v. People, the court held that the Fourth Amendment does not preclude prosecutors from using evidence at trial that a suspect refused to take a blood alcohol test, the news release says. In People v. Hyde, the Supreme Court held that an officer with probable cause to believe that an unconscious driver committed an alcohol-related driving crime can order the driver’s blood to be tested. In People v. Simpson, a judge ruled that the very act of reading a driver an expressed consent advisement made the subsequent test inadmissible. But the Colorado Supreme Court held that reading a suspect the expressed consent advisement does not render the test involuntary, the news release says. In the Simpson case, an officer saw William Paul Simpson drive a pickup truck into a curb four times before steering into oncoming traffic, the Supreme Court ruling says. The officer smelled alcohol on Simpson’s breath, the driver readily admitted he was drunk and was unable to climb out of the truck at the officer’s order.
At a hospital, Simpson signed a consent form for a blood test. In doing so, however, he signed his name on the officer’s signature line and initialed it on the line labeled “blood.” Simpson’s blood alcohol was measured at 0.448, or more than five times the legal limit of 0.08, the ruling says. At an Arapahoe County District Court motions hearing, Simpson’s attorneys argued their client had been too drunk to consent to a test. Judge F. Stephen Collins ruled that the officer was coercive because he told Simpson that he had already consented to the blood-alcohol test. Collins then suppressed the blood test. The Supreme Court ruled that by choosing to drive in Colorado, Simpson consented to the terms of the expressed consent statute, including its requirement that he submit to a blood draw. “Because Simpson never revoked that consent, the blood draw was constitutional,” the Supreme Court ruled. Suspected drunk drivers were using some recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions to challenge Colorado’s drunken driving laws in order to throw out evidence, according to Brauchler’s news release. Had they succeeded, drunken driving laws across the country would have been in jeopardy, he said.
Read more here: denverpost.com/2017/04/17/colorado-supreme-court-state-dui-laws-upheld/
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