The US Supreme Court will update the rules on how individuals charged with driving under the influence (DUI) are prosecuted by reviewing cases that deal with "refusal" issues.
According to The Newspaper, there is a state law in North Dakota that considers the refusal to take blood, urine, and alcohol in a DUI case a crime. The court will tackle the constitutionality of this rule based on Birchfield v. North Dakota and Beylund v. North Dakota.
In the Wisconsin Appeal site, the three cases, Birchfield v. North Dakota, Beylund v. Levi, and Bernard v. Minnesota, are all presented with the same question. The issue is "whether, in the absence of a warrant, a State may make it a crime for a person to refuse to take a chemical test to detect the presence of alcohol in the person's blood."
In the Beylund case, driver Steve Michael Beylund only took the blood test after he was threatened with criminal penalties for refusal. Meanwhile, in Birchfield's case, driver Danny Birchfield refused to undergo a breath test.
In Alexander Ransom law offices' official website both these drunk driving cases somehow continue the Supreme Court's ruling in the 2013 Missouri v. McNeely, which states that the police should get a warrant before carrying out a test. According to the Court's ruling the alcohol's presence in the bloodstream doesn't necessarily mean it is an emergency that allows a warrantless DUI test.
According to the North Dakota justices, "Birchfield has not drawn our attention to any appellate court decisions striking down criminal refusal statutes, and we have found that since the [US] Supreme Court's ruling in McNeely, criminal refusal statutes have continued to withstand Fourth Amendment challenges, particularly in Minnesota."
Meanwhile, in Bernard v. Minnesota, William Robert Bernard Jr used his truck to pull a boat out of water and wasn't really driving towards another location. This case focuses on treating a breath test as a search incident that leads to arrest.
