Georgia Supreme Court Holds that Implied Consent Is Not Actual Consent

Prosecuting impaired drivers in Georgia just got a little bit harder. The Georgia Supreme Court held last week in Williams v. State, __ S.E.2d __ (Ga. 2015) that the mere fact that a DUI suspect agreed to allow officers to withdraw his blood--after being told that Georgia law required him to submit to testing and that his driver’s license would be revoked for a year if he refused--did not establish the sort of voluntary consent necessary to excuse the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement. Is this a watershed moment in implied consent law? First, the facts. Williams was arrested for driving under the influence. The officer read Williams a statutory implied consent notice and asked that Williams submit to blood and urine tests. The officer told Williams that it was a “‘a yes or no question’”, and Williams said “yes.” Williams was then taken to a medical center where his blood was withdrawn and a urine sample obtained. The issue. Williams moved to suppress the results of the blood test on the basis that gathering the blood without a search warrant violated his Fourth Amendment rights.  He argued that Georgia’s implied consent statute was unconstitutional because consent obtained solely under the statute was not voluntary consent for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.  The trial court rejected his argument.  Williams appealed. The opinion. The Georgia Supreme Court’s analysis is straightforward. The extraction of a defendant’s blood at the direction of a law enforcement officer is a search governed by the reasonableness requirement of [...]