Police hope syringes help cut back on drunk driving

BOISE, Idaho -- When police officer Darryll Dowell is on patrol in the southwestern Idaho city of Nampa, he'll pull up at a stoplight and usually start casing the vehicle. Nowadays, his eyes will also focus on the driver's arms, as he tries to search for a plump, bouncy vein.

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 if blood draws by cops can be an effective tool against drunk drivers and aid in their prosecution.

For years, defense attorneys in Idaho advised clients to always refuse breath tests, Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Christine Starr said.

Starr hopes the new system will cut down on the number of drunken driving trials. Officers can't hold down a suspect and force them to breathe into a tube, she noted, but they can forcefully take blood.

The nation's highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done 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 done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner.

The practice of police drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, has also 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' DUI Committee.

The officer phlebotomists are generally trained under the same program as their state's hospital or clinical phlebotomists.