Providing Notice of Implied Consent Rights to Persons Who Do Not Speak English (Part II)

Part I of this post left for another day consideration of whether a defendant who does not speak English may be deemed to have willfully refused a chemical analysis when notice of the implied consent rights is provided only in English and whether providing notice only in English may violate such a defendant’s constitutional rights. That day has arrived. [Editor’s note: already!] Rather than considering notice of implied consent rights as properly provided when the rights are read as set out in the statute, even if they are read in English to a non-English speaking defendant, the appropriate focus may be upon whether the officer used reasonable methods to convey those warnings. The Supreme Court of Wisconsin in State v. Piddington, 623 N.W.2d 528 (Wis. 2001), employed such an approach to determine whether an officer appropriately conveyed implied consent warnings to a deaf defendant. The Supreme Court of Iowa adopted the Piddington approach in State v. Garcia, 756 N.W.2d 216 (Iowa 2008), determining that the officer in that case used reasonable methods to convey implied consent warnings to a defendant who understood limited English. If reasonableness is the touchstone, then it must require something more than stating the rights in English to a person who does not understand the language, though it may not require than an interpreter be provided in every instance. Cf. State v. Ortez, 178 N.C. App. 236, 245 (2006) (holding that grammatical errors in Raleigh Police Department’s Spanish translation of Miranda warnings did not render warnings inadequate as adequacy [...]