Impaired driving accidents are responsible for thousands of deaths each year—on average one every fifty-three minutes. In addition to the toll on human life, impaired driving arrests place an enormous burden on our criminal justice system: law enforcement carried out more than 1.1 million arrests for driving-while-impaired (DWI) in 2014. To help enforce DWI laws, every state in the country has “implied consent” laws that require drivers to undergo testing when there is sufficient reason to believe that they are impaired. These laws have been the subject of significant litigation in recent years, up to and including the United States Supreme Court.
The United States Supreme Court recently released its decision in Birchfield v. North Dakota. The Birchfield Court held that criminalizing the refusal to take a warrantless breath test incident to arrest for DWI is constitutional but criminalizing the refusal to take a blood test under the same circumstances is not. The Court left a significant question unanswered by not ruling on the constitutionality of criminalizing the refusal to take a warrantless urine test incident to arrest for DWI, the other common method of testing allowed by the DWI statutes. Only months after the Birchfield decision was released, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled on this issue in State v. Thompson. The Thompson court held that a warrantless test of an arrestee’s urine incident to arrest for DWI constitutes an unconstitutional search and refusing to take such a test cannot be criminalized.
To help explain the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision in Thompson, this Note begins with a brief historical overview of the exclusionary rule as applied to the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. Next, this Note examines some of the significant cases that provided the framework for the Thompson court’s analysis. This Note then focuses on Thompson and lays out the facts and procedural history of the case. Finally, this Note analyzes the Thompson court’s decision and argues that the court erred due to incorrectly weighing the interests involved and failing to give adequate consideration to the purpose of the warrant requirement. Therefore, this Note encourages the Minnesota Supreme Court to reconsider its decision in a future case or, alternatively, encourages the United States Supreme Court to grant certiorari to address this issue.