4/28/16 On April 26, 2016, the Arizona Supreme Court issued two decisions involving persons arrested under Arizona DUI Implied Consent laws. See my blog about the Valenzuela case for the arguments. In a similar case, State v. Brown, involving the same issues but for the Implied Consent Law for Boating Under the Influence (OUI), the court said that an arrestee’s consent to submission to chemical tests was not freely given and held that the use of the test results should be suppressed. In Valenzuela the court said even though consent to chemical tests was not freely given by the arrestee, because of the Good Faith Exception to the Exclusionary Rule the court said suppression was not appropriate in that case. The Exclusionary Rule holds that if the police obtain evidence by violating a person’s constitutional rights the prosecutor cannot use that evidence at trial. The reason for the rule is to deter illegal police activity. The Good Faith Exception to the Exclusionary Rule holds that if the police acted in good faith relying on existing case law the use of evidence at trial should not be suppressed. The reason for the exception is society wants the police to rely on court interpretation of what the law is and it would serve no purpose to penalize them for doing so if the courts later changed the law. In Valenzuela the court said the police were acting in good faith and were relying on then existing state law, and therefore used the Good Faith Exception to say the use of the evidence (chemical test results) should not be suppressed at trial.
In Brown, however, the court did not apply the Good Faith Exception. It did not do so because the prosecutor failed to make that argument in the trial and in the lower appellate courts. The prosecutor first tried to argue the Good Faith Exception applied in oral argument before the Arizona Supreme Court, and the court said that was too late. Based on the Valenzuela case, had the prosecutor properly made the Good Faith Exception argument in the trial and lower appellate courts, the Supreme Court would then have ruled for the prosecutor. Instead the court reversed the defendant’s OUI .08% charge and remanded the case to the trial court to see if the defendant would have been convicted of OUI to the slightest degree without the use of the chemical test results.
In short, the prosecutor lost because they did not make the proper argument in time.
The case can be found here:
http://www.azcourts.gov/Portals/0/OpinionFiles/Supreme/2016/CV150042PR.pdf
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