Cops train to draw blood from DUI suspects

Boise, Idaho — When police officer Darryll Dowell is casing a vehicle in the southwestern Idaho city of Nampa, he’ll also check the driver’s arms in search for a plump, bouncy vein.

“I was looking at people’s arms and hands, thinking, ‘I could draw from that,’ ” Mr. Dowell said.

It’s all part of training he and a select cadre of officers in Idaho and Texas have received in recent months to draw blood from those suspected of drunken or drugged driving. The federal program’s aim is to determine whether police can use blood draws as an effective tool against drunken drivers and whether the practice can aid in prosecution.

If the results seem promising after a year or two, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will encourage police nationwide to undergo similar training.

For years, defense lawyers in Idaho advised clients to always refuse breath tests, Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Christine Starr said. When the state toughened its penalties for refusing the tests a few years ago, the problem decreased, but it’s still the main reason that drunken driving cases go to trial in the Boise region, Miss Starr said.

Idaho had a 20 percent breath test refusal rate in 2005, compared with 22 percent nationally, according to an NHTSA study.

Miss Starr said she hopes the new system will reduce the number of drunken driving trials. Officers can’t force a suspect to breathe into a tube, she noted, but they can forcefully take blood - a practice that’s been upheld by Idaho’s Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The nation’s highest court ruled in 1966 that police could force a blood test on a drunken-driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was conducted after an arrest and that it was carried out in a medically approved manner.

The practice of police officers drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, also has raised concerns about safety and the credibility of the evidence.

“I would imagine that a lot of people would be wary of having their blood drawn by an officer on the hood of their police vehicle,” said Steve Oberman, chairman of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ committee on drunken driving.

Police phlebotomists are generally trained under the same program as their state’s hospital or clinical phlebotomists, but they train under a compressed schedule with some of the curriculum cut.

That’s because officers don’t need to know how to draw blood from a foot or other difficult sites, or from an infant or medically fragile patient, said Nicole Watson, the College of Western Idaho phlebotomy instructor teaching the Idaho officers.

Instead, they are trained on the elbow crease, the forearm and the back of the hand. If none of these sites is accessible, they’ll take the suspect to a hospital for testing.

In a nondescript Boise office building where the Nampa officers were being trained, Mr. Dowell scanned his subject and prepared to draw blood. Chase Abston, an officer taking his turn playing a suspect, recoiled, pressing his back deeper into the gray pleather chair.

Mr. Dowell slid a fine-gauge needle into the back of Mr. Abston’s hand. Mr. Abston, who had been holding his breath, exhaled slowly as his blood began to flow.

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