TX: Officers jumped the gun on facts for exigency based warrantless blood draw; suppression affirmed

Defendant was in a “catastrophic car crash” and was at the hospital. Officers suspected defendant had been driving under the influence. Medical treatment and IVs were expected, and a warrantless blood draw was done. It turned out that it was all premature. The trial judge found no facts supporting exigency, and that binds appellate review. State v. Garcia, 2018 Tex. Crim. App. LEXIS 1209 (Dec. 12, 2018):

Our holding is not based on the trial judge’s difficult-to-comprehend finding that the officers’ “assessment” that exigent circumstances existed “[was] not credible.” This finding can only be understood in one of two ways, neither of which is particularly helpful in this context. To the extent that, through this finding, the trial judge was trying to communicate that he considered the officers’ assessment of the facts to have been unreasonable under the circumstances, that is a legal conclusion to which we owe no deference. To the extent that the judge was indicating that he simply did not credit the officers’ testimony that they believed in good faith that they were faced with an exigency, such a finding is irrelevant to the objective Fourth-Amendment inquiry. We disregard all of the trial judge’s various “finding[s]” to this effect.

Instead, our holding is based on the sensible notion that “a warrantless search must be strictly circumscribed by the exigencies which justify its initiation.” Or, as the trial judge rather succinctly put it, “[o]nce the exigency ends, it ends.” The trial judge acted within his discretion to find that, at the time of the search, Rodriguez, Lom, and Torres were collectively aware of facts that would lead an objectively reasonable officer to conclude that any exigency presented by the possibility of medical care had passed. Although we might well have dissected the officers’ awareness of historical facts differently were we in the trial judge’s position, “[t]he trial judge decides that fact. The court of appeals does not. We do not. And appellate courts must view the trial judge’s factual findings in the light most favorable to his ultimate conclusion.”