Background
Around midnight, Steven Castro crashed his car into a parked vehicle in a residential neighborhood in Bloomington, San Bernardino County, injuring a rideshare driver waiting inside. Neighbors restrained Castro as he tried to flee. California Highway Patrol officers responded, and one of them alerted Officer Robert Pope — who was already at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center working on an unrelated matter — that the suspected DUI driver was being transported to the same hospital.
By the time Officer Pope visited the emergency room at approximately 2:30 a.m., Castro had been sedated by hospital staff because he had been aggressive and combative. He was unresponsive, and ER personnel told Pope he would remain so for another two to three hours. At 3:45 a.m., Pope decided to arrest Castro for driving under the influence and causing bodily injury under Vehicle Code section 23153. Smelling alcohol and relying on Castro’s unconscious state, Pope ordered a phlebotomist without ever seeking a blood-draw warrant. He explained: “due to implied consent, I do not need to, if the person is unable to give consent due to him being unconscious or sedated.”
The phlebotomist arrived at 4:00 a.m. and drew Castro’s blood at 4:25 a.m., revealing a blood-alcohol content of 0.193. Castro moved to suppress the results under Penal Code section 1538.5, arguing Pope needed a warrant. Both the magistrate at the preliminary hearing and the superior court denied the motion, finding exigent circumstances under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Mitchell v. Wisconsin (2019) framework. Castro pleaded no contest and appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Fourth Appellate District reversed, holding that the warrantless blood draw violated the Fourth Amendment. The court applied the two-part test from Mitchell v. Wisconsin (2019), which recognized that an unconscious DUI suspect will “almost always” present exigent circumstances — but not automatically. Exigency requires both that BAC evidence is dissipating and that some other factor creates “pressing health, safety, or law enforcement needs” that would take priority over obtaining a warrant.
Following its 2023 decision in People v. Alvarez, the court found the second factor missing here. Officer Pope was never at the collision scene, which is the paradigmatic situation Mitchell had in mind: officers managing chaos, injured victims, and traffic hazards all at once. Pope was at the hospital the entire evening. Between his 3:45 a.m. arrest decision and the 4:25 a.m. blood draw — a 40-minute window — the prosecution offered no evidence of what Pope was actually doing. When defense counsel tried to ask, the prosecution successfully objected that the question was “irrelevant.” The court held it could not assume competing investigative duties where none were established.
The court also rejected the magistrate’s rationale that every minute Pope spent at the hospital was a minute he could have spent patrolling the freeway. Accepting that logic would eliminate the warrant requirement entirely, since an officer can always be doing something else. Mitchell, the court stressed, was about the genuine, competing demands that accident scenes impose — not a blanket exception for hospital-based blood draws. The case was reversed with instructions to grant the suppression motion and allow Castro to withdraw his guilty plea.
Key Takeaways
- Mitchell v. Wisconsin does not create a blanket exception to the warrant requirement for warrantless blood draws from unconscious DUI suspects — exigency must still be established on a case-by-case basis, particularly the second Mitchell factor: that pressing needs would have interfered with seeking a warrant.
- Officers who were never at the accident scene and who face no documented competing investigative duties while awaiting a phlebotomist cannot claim exigency. The mere fact that they could have been doing something else is not enough.
- Prosecutors bear the burden of presenting evidence of an officer’s activities during the window between arrest and blood draw. Unanswered questions about what the officer was doing during that period undermine an exigency defense.
- California follows People v. Alvarez (2023): a suspect’s unconsciousness caused by medical sedation at a hospital — rather than injuries from the accident itself — does not, without more, supply the exigency that Mitchell contemplates.
- Defense counsel in DUI suppression motions should probe exactly what the arresting officer was doing between the decision to arrest and the blood draw, and what steps — if any — were taken to evaluate whether a warrant was feasible.
Why It Matters
This decision tightens the boundaries around one of the most commonly litigated exceptions to the Fourth Amendment warrant requirement in California DUI cases. After Mitchell v. Wisconsin in 2019, some law enforcement agencies treated an unconscious suspect as a near-automatic green light for a warrantless blood draw. Castro, building on Alvarez, signals that California courts will closely scrutinize whether officers actually faced the kind of competing, on-scene demands that justify bypassing the warrant process — and that hospital settings, where exigency is less obvious, will receive heightened scrutiny.
For criminal defense practitioners, this case reinforces the value of detailed cross-examination about an officer’s timeline and activities during the window between arrest and blood draw. For prosecutors and law enforcement, it is a reminder to document competing investigative duties and to consider seeking telephonic warrants even when a suspect is unconscious — particularly when the officer has never been to the accident scene. For anyone charged with DUI causing injury, this case illustrates that the admissibility of blood test results may turn on facts that have nothing to do with how much was consumed.