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Part 2: Essential cases to know in handling challenges to scientific evidence
By Leonard R. Stamm
Fourth Amendment
No discussion of cases that may be used to challenge scientific evidence
would be complete without acknowledging challenges based on Fourth
Amendment cases to the search and seizure of samples of breath, blood,
urine, or of the defendant’s person. At the same time, this area is the
subject of treatises, numerous cases, and articles on a subject that is
too broad to be adequately covered in this article.
Blood Tests
In Schmerber v. California, 384 U.S. 757 (1966), the Supreme
Court approved the forcible extraction of blood without a warrant where
the state had probable cause to seize the defendant’s blood for an
alcohol test and established that due to the dissipating nature of blood
alcohol there was no time to obtain a search warrant. The police acted
within the Fourth Amendment requirement of reasonableness when they took
the defendant to a medical facility, where the risk of infection was
minimized, to have blood drawn, even thou
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