[JURIST] The Minnesota Court of Appeals [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Tuesday that an officer must obtain a warrant in order to test the blood of a person suspected of driving while intoxicated (DWI). Minnesota’s implied consent law, Statute § 169A.20, subdivision 2 (2012) [text] makes it a crime for a person “to refuse submit to a chemical test of the person’s blood, breath, or urine” when suspected of DWI. The court held that this statute implicated a fundamental right, differentiating between a breath test and a blood test because blood tests can only be administered by qualified health care providers and are far more intrusive than breath tests. The court held that these differences made the “warrantless search of … blood” unconstitutional. However, the court also held that if exigent circumstances were present, the warrantless search of blood would be constitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

The appeals court relied on the US Supreme Court [official website] decision Missouri v. McNeely [SCOTUSblog backgrounder], which held that the Fourth Amendment may require a warrant [JURIST report] for a blood test in a drunk-driving investigation. The divided court ultimately held that “in drunk-driving investigations, the natural dissipation of alcohol in the bloodstream does not constitute an exigency in every case sufficient to justify a blood test without a warrant.” In 2013 the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld [JURIST report] the state’s DWI implied consent law, ruling it is constitutional under the Fourth Amendment. Similar laws have been struck down in Texas and Nevada [JURIST reports]