Courts hold that officers may rely on law in effect at the time they conduct a search

Overview: The California Court of Appeal recently held, in two separate rulings, that the recent holdings requiring law enforcement officers to obtain a search warrant prior to forcing a blood draw and searching the contents of a cell phone do not apply retroactively to searches conducted prior to those rulings.

Training Points: Law enforcement agencies and their jurisdiction’s prosecuting offices need not be concerned about suppression of evidence for those cases pre-dating the McNeely and Riley decisions that involved forced blood draws or evidence obtained during a warrantless search of an arrestee’s cellular phone. The evidence obtained from those “searches” prior to these two decisions remain admissible so long as they were lawfully obtained and in accordance with the laws at the time of the search, and with the agency’s department policy.

Summary Analysis: Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court surprised the law enforcement community when it ruled that, before law enforcement may force a blood draw to support a DUI investigation, for example, it had to obtain a search warrant, absent demonstrable and particular exigent circumstances in each case. (Missouri v. McNeely (2013) 133 S.Ct. 1552) Prior to the McNeely decision, law enforcement relied upon Schmerber v. California (1966) 384 U.S. 757, which permitted compelled, warrantless blood draws since the evidence of alcohol or drugs in the human body dissipates rapidly over time. (People v. Superior Court (Hawkins) (1972) 6 Cal.3d 757.)

Since the McNeely ruling, law enforcement officers have  struggled to adhere to the new search warrant requirement. The McNeely decision led to the amendment of Penal Code section 1534 (search warrant statute) so as to authorize warrants for DUI investigations.

In an even more stunning decision this summer, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the search of the digital content of a cellphone seized incident to arrest had to be authorized by a search warrant in the absence of “exigent circumstances” requiring an immediate search. (Riley v. California (2014) 134 S.Ct. 2473.)

Of course, law enforcement officers have conducted countless warrantless blood draws and cellphone searches prior to McNeely and Riley. Many of those searches related to cases that  remain pending. Therefore, the question remained whether those decisions would apply  retroactively to exclude evidence obtained in those prior searches?

Last week, the Court of Appeal, relying on the “good faith exception” to the exclusionary rule, (which holds that if an officer conducts a search in good faith reliance on existing law, the exclusionary rule does not apply to require the suppression of evidence obtained as a result of that search) determined neither McNeely nor Riley apply retroactively to exclude evidence obtained from lawful searches that predate these decisions.

In People v. Machado, handed down Sept. 3, 2014, the court held that the holding in Riley limiting search of the digital content of a cellphone incident to arrest did not require suppression of evidence seized from a cellphone search that occurred prior to the Riley decision. In People v. Youn, issued two days after Machado, the appellate court held that the McNeely decision, requiring a search warrant for a forced blood draw, did not apply to require suppression of evidence derived from a warrantless forced blood draw that occurred prior to the McNeeley decision.