State v. Dias

Christine Dias was arrested in Fulton County on suspicion of driving under the influence and refused to submit to a blood test. She asked the trial court to keep that refusal out of her trial and to declare the Georgia law allowing such evidence unconstitutional, arguing it violated her rights against self-incrimination and unreasonable searches. The trial court agreed, relying on prior Supreme Court of Georgia cases about breath and urine tests. The State appealed, and the Supreme Court of Georgia found that those prior cases dealt only with breath and urine tests, not blood tests, and did not support excluding blood-test refusal evidence on self-incrimination grounds. The court did not decide whether the evidence should be excluded for some other reason, since the trial court never actually ruled on that separate, novel question. The court sent the case back so the trial court could consider it properly.

The trial court erred by excluding evidence of Dias's blood-test refusal based on the self-incrimination reasoning from prior cases about breath tests, because those cases expressly did not extend to blood draws; whether the evidence should be excluded on some other, unaddressed ground remains open for the trial court to decide.

The ruling means Georgia prosecutors can still generally seek to use a DUI suspect's refusal to take a blood test as evidence unless a court finds another specific reason to exclude it, leaving open questions that could affect how DUI cases are tried statewide.

Judgment vacated and case remanded

1. The court explained that in an earlier case called Elliott, it held that Paragraph XVI of the Georgia Constitution (the state's protection against self-incrimination) bars using a suspect's refusal to take a breath test against them, because giving deep lung air is a self-incriminating act.
2. The court clarified that this breath-test rule has never been extended to blood tests, and other precedent has specifically said the self-incrimination reasoning does not apply to blood draws, so the trial court was wrong to rely on that reasoning here.
3. Because the trial court's ruling rested on the mistaken idea that Elliott's self-incrimination holding covered blood tests, the constitutional basis it actually used to exclude the evidence did not hold up.
4. The court noted that Dias also raised other arguments, including that her refusal was simply the exercise of her Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches, but the trial court never directly ruled on that separate theory, so the appellate court could not address it.
5. Because Georgia courts require that a constitutional question be directly and distinctly ruled on below before the Supreme Court of Georgia can review it, the court sent the case back so the trial court could properly consider any remaining basis for excluding the evidence.

• DUI
• blood test refusal
• implied consent law
• self-incrimination
• Fourth Amendment