Missouri V. Mcneely Case Summary

In 2013, the Court accepted certiorari on two very significant cases that wrestled with significant Fourth Amendment issues. In Missouri v. McNeely, the respondent, McNeely, was pulled over on suspicion of driving-while-impaired after the officer witnessed him driving erratically. McNeely failed other field sobriety tests, and then refused to provide a breath sample for a preliminary breath test. The officer placed McNeely under arrest, and began to transport him back to the station. Once McNeely informed the officer that he would again refuse to provide a breath sample at the station, the officer diverted McNeely to a hospital to obtain a sample of McNeely’s blood. At the hospital, the officer read the informed-consent advisory to McNeely, and informed him that test-refusal would result in license revocation and could be used as evidence in a subsequent prosecution. McNeely still refused to consent to any testing. The officer directed a hospital technician to take a blood sample anyways, that revealed that McNeely’s blood alcohol concentration was almost twice the legal limit.
McNeely was subsequently charged with driving while intoxicated, and he moved to suppress the results of the blood test on the grounds that the blood draw constituted a warrantless search that was prohibited by the

Fourth Amendment. He argued that the search could not be justified because of the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement. The district court agreed that the search violated the Fourth Amendment, and the Missouri Supreme Court affirmed. The Court granted certiorari on the issue of whether the natural dissipation of alcohol from the body constituted a per se exigency, so as to justify states in either conducting warrantless tests, or in criminalizing the refusal of warrantless tests.
The Court held that the exigent circumstances exception requires a case-by-case analysis that is dependent on the totality of the circumstances. The Court held that it would not “depart from careful case-by-case assessment of exigency and adopt the categorical rule proposed by the State.” While the Court cites to several exigent circumstance cases that clearly use such language, there are exceptions. Further, it does appear that for some cases, the language that the McNeely Court used to describe past Courts’ reasoning does not necessarily match up with the language used in the actual cases.
The Court’s holding in McNeely abrogated Minnesota caselaw upholding the constitutionality of the State’s implied-consent laws as justified by the “single-factor” exigent circumstance of the “rapid, natural dissipation of alcohol in the blood.”
That same year, in Maryland v. King, the Court addressed a challenge to a Maryland law that incorporated a DNA test into the procedures used to check arrestees into local jails. Respondent King was arrested on assault charges and, as part of routine procedure, police took a DNA sample via a cotton swab from his inner cheek. When the sample was analyzed, King’s DNA was matched to semen recovered from an unsolved rape that occurred six years prior to King’s current arrest. After King’s conviction for that rape, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that the DNA swab was an unconstitutional search and reversed, only to have the United States Supreme Court grant certiorari on the question of the constitutionality of the statute.
The Court first held that the DNA testing clearly constituted a search of the person, and thus implicated the Fourth Amendment. The Court noted that, as an administrative search, requiring a warrant for the test in this case would be a near pointless exercise, noting that “in light of the standardized nature of the tests and the minimal discretion vested in those charged with administering the program, there are virtually no facts for a neutral magistrate to evaluate.” The Court then engaged in a rigorous balancing test to evaluate the reasonableness of the search. It held that the only government interest involved was that of correctly identifying the persons that they held in custody, which was compelling for four reasons. The Court held that identification by way of DNA analysis was crucial for the purposes of: thwarting attempts by the arrestee to conceal his identify, protecting the safety of officers and existing detainees, ensuring that the government can produce individuals for trial, and finally for assessing the potential danger that the individual would present if allowed to be released on bail.
The Court concluded that these interests outweighed the privacy interests of the individuals involved. To begin, it held that in all cases arrestees have a diminished expectation of privacy. The Court held that the search was minimal because, “[a] gentle rub along the inside of the cheek does not break the skin, and it ‘involves virtually no risk, trauma, or pain.’”
The Court declared that DNA testing had the “unmatched potential” to serve the government interest in identifying the persons that it had arrested, which deserved “great weight.” It also specifically noted that the methodology used to identify individuals using their DNA does not reveal any genetic traits of the individual. Further, the Court noted that the DNA collection statute itself limits any further use of the DNA sample obtained from the arrestees. Interestingly, the Court accepted at face value the contention that the DNA samples that the State obtained would not be used for any purpose other than identification of the arrestee. Instead, the Court merely noted that “[i]f in the future police analyze samples to determine, for instance, an arrestee's predisposition for a particular disease or other hereditary factors not relevant to identity, that case would present additional privacy concerns not present here.” The Court also reasoned that DNA testing in this context was analogous to the current practice (which existed prior to Weeks v. United States and the beginning of modern Fourth Amendment jurisprudence) of fingerprinting suspects upon arrest. Justice Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of the majority, concluding with a hope that a future Court would reverse the opinion.
The very next year, the Court granted certiorari on a case that applied Fourth Amendment principles to a situation that the founding fathers could never have anticipated. In Riley v. California, in a consolidated proceeding, the Court addressed two cases where police searched an arrestee without a warrant and discovered evidence on cell phones. The Court noted that, absent historical guidance, it is the Court’s duty to balance “the degree to which [a search] intrudes upon an individual's privacy [against] the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”
The Court based its holding on the rationale for searches incident-to-arrest generally. It held that cell phone data cannot possibly be used as a weapon to attack the arresting officer. The Court also held that the argument that accessing the data could allow officers to avoid collateral danger was too far removed from the search itself for them to consider, because that justification could apply to any potential search.
The Court further held that the preservation of evidence, though a more compelling interest, was also insufficient justification to allow these searches incident-to-arrest. The Court held that the main danger asserted by the State, that a third party could either wipe the data on the phone or encrypt it remotely, was obviously “distinct” from reasoning in earlier cases, and the danger was thus unpersuasive.
On the other side of the balancing test, the Court found that even though an arrestee had a reduced expectation of privacy simply due to being arrested, the intrusion into the privacy interests of the arrestee was still unreasonable. The Court referenced the fact that smart phones are essentially “minicomputers” that are materially different than the crumpled up pack of cigarettes in Robinson.
The State presented an alternative argument that searches of an arrestee’s cell phone should be permissible when the arresting officer has probable cause to believe that the phone contains evidence of the crime of arrest.

The State based the argument on the reasoning of an earlier case, Arizona v. Gant, which created an addition to the search incident-to-arrest exception regarding vehicles. In Gant the Court held that when held that when a suspect is arrested in a motor vehicle, a search of that vehicle is constitutional as a search incident-to-arrest when “it is ‘reasonable to believe evidence relevant to the crime of arrest might be found in the

vehicle.’”
The government argued that there should be a similar addition for cell phones when there was probable cause to believe that there was evidence on a seized phone that was relevant to the crime that the suspect was arrested for. The Court rejected this argument, holding that motor vehicles present “heightened law enforcement needs” that cell phones do not, and that in virtually any situation where a cell phone was seized incident-to-arrest an officer could come up with sufficient probable cause to justify a full search of the data on the phone.
Finally, in Birchfield v. North Dakota, a consolidated case, the United States Supreme Court held that warrantless breath tests were categorically constitutional incident-to a valid arrest for driving-while-impaired, but that warrantless blood tests were not. The case involved three defendants, each with a slightly different set of facts, but all of whom challenged the constitutionality of their state’s implied-consent laws. The issue that the Court granted certiorari on was essentially the same for all three cases: was a warrantless test, of breath or blood, permissible as a search incident-to-arrest?
The Court began it analysis with a general discussion of the implied warrant requirement of the Fourth Amendment, before moving on to the specific issue in the case, i.e. the search incident-to-arrest exception. The Court went through the historical basis for the exception before deciding, consistent with Riley, that because there was no historical analogue to chemical tests for blood-alcohol-concentration, the proper analysis for whether the exception applies in a certain situation should be determined “by assessing, on the one hand, the degree to which it intrudes upon an individual's privacy and, on the other, the degree to which it is needed for the promotion of legitimate governmental interests.”
In regard to breath tests, the Court reaffirmed their assertion from Skinner that “breath tests do not ‘implicat[e] significant privacy concerns.’” Its analysis focused primarily on the degree of physical intrusion into the body that the testing required. The Court held that regardless of the test requiring the suspect to insert the mouthpiece of the testing machine into his or her mouth, there was nothing “strange nor painful” about the test. Importantly, the Court directly compared the breath search at issue in that case with the DNA swab in Maryland v. King – despite the fact that the two searches were justified by different exceptions to the warrant requirement.
The Court then went on to note that breath tests only reveal one piece of information, and do not place a sample of any biological material in the hands of police. Again, it contrasted the testing in this case with the test in King. Finally, it also mentioned that breath tests are not likely to cause an enhancement to the embarrassment that is already “inherent in any arrest,” and that after an arrest, “the individual’s expectation of privacy is necessarily diminished.
To contrast, the Court noted that blood tests are different because they require “’piercing the skin’ and extract[ing] a part of the subject’s body.” The decision also included the dramatic point that “while humans exhale air from their lungs many times per minute, humans do not continually shed blood.” The Court finished its analysis of the intrusion of blood tests by noting that a blood test places a sample into the hands of law enforcement.
On the other hand, the Court held that the government has a “paramount interest . . . in preserving the safety of . . . public highways.”