In State v. Johnson, the Georgia Court of Appeals reinforced the principle that search warrants must be specific in their scope and cannot be broadly interpreted to authorize additional searches beyond what was originally permitted. In this case, the court ruled that a search warrant obtained to test a driver’s blood for alcohol cannot be used to later search for drugs in the driver’s system.
The case arose from a DUI investigation in which law enforcement officers obtained a search warrant to test the driver’s blood for alcohol content. However, after collecting the blood sample, authorities proceeded to test for the presence of drugs as well—without obtaining a separate warrant! Johnson moved to suppress the drug test results, arguing that the search exceeded the scope of the warrant.
The trial court agreed with Johnson, ruling that the warrant was limited in scope to testing for alcohol and did not authorize a broad analysis for drugs. The prosecution appealed, contending that testing for both alcohol and drugs was a reasonable extension of the search warrant.
The Georgia Court of Appeals upheld the trial court’s suppression of the drug test results. The court emphasized that search warrants must be specific in their authorization and that law enforcement cannot expand the scope of a warrant on their own initiative. Because the original search warrant only permitted a test for alcohol, testing the blood for drugs was an unauthorized search and violated the Fourth Amendment.
This decision serves as an important reminder that constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures apply to DUI blood tests just as they do in other criminal investigations. If law enforcement wants to test for substances beyond what is explicitly authorized in a search warrant, they must obtain a separate warrant.