The Minnesota Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that collecting urine without a warrant in suspected drunken driving cases is unconstitutional, mirroring earlier findings from the U.S. Supreme Court regarding blood tests.
"Such tests significantly intrude upon an individual's privacy and cannot be justified by the State's interests given the availability of less-invasive breath tests that may be performed incident to a valid arrest," Chief Justice Lorie Gildea wrote in the court's opinion in State v. Thompson.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota applauded the decision.
"Forcing Minnesotans to undergo an intrusive blood or urine search without a warrant, violates fundamental privacy rights," its executive director, Charles Samuelson, said in a written statement.
Ryan M. Thompson was arrested in April 2012 for suspected drunken driving. He failed field sobriety tests and a preliminary breath test, and refused to provide a blood or urine test in jail.
Thompson was charged with refusing the tests, and convicted. The conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeals, which ruled that Thompson's rights had been violated because a warrant had not been issued for either his blood or urine. The state argued that Minnesota law was constitutionally applied in Thompson's prosecution.
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Birchfield v. North Dakota that found warrantless blood tests were unconstitutional because of the physical intrusion caused by inserting a needle into a defendant's body served as a framework for testing Minnesota's law, according to the state Supreme Court. The federal decision did not address warrantless urine tests.
Gildea wrote that although urine tests don't require physical intrusion into the body, as Thompson argued, there is an even greater risk associated with urine samples, as they can "contain additional metabolites and other types of 'highly personal information' that will never appear in a blood sample."
