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NM: DWI sufficiently serious to justify exigent circumstances for warrantless entry, depending on the circumstances

By John Wesley Hall, Jr.

DWI is sufficiently serious a crime, noting Welsh, that exigent circumstances are possible, but there are no bright line rules. A warrantless entry might be reasonable under the circumstances. State v. Nance, 2011 N.M. App. LEXIS 14 (March 15, 2011): P19 Perhaps because reasonableness is the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment inquiry, courts have resisted fashioning per se rules authorizing warrantless home entry based only upon the dissipation of alcohol. For example, while the United States Supreme Court in Welsh stated that “a warrantless home arrest cannot be upheld simply because evidence of the petitioner’s blood-alcohol level might have dissipated while the police obtained a warrant,” it was careful to repeatedly qualify this statement as applying only in light of the fact that Wisconsin had chosen to classify a first offense DWI as a non-criminal civil forfeiture offense for which no imprisonment was possible...continue to full post

Full post as published by Fourth Amendment on March 22, 2011 (boomark / email).