State v. Price
| Decision Date | 26 July 2019 |
| Docket Number | No. 119,411,119,411 |
| Citation | 444 P.3d 1017 (Table) |
| Parties | STATE of Kansas, Appellee, v. Kaila Marie PRICE, Appellant. |
| Court | Kansas Court of Appeals |
Defendant Kaila M. Price appeals her conviction for driving under the influence, a misdemeanor violation of K.S.A. 8-1567, following a bench trial to the Lyon County District Court on stipulated facts. On appeal, Price argues the district court erred in denying her pretrial motions to exclude statements she made to law enforcement officers and the results of a blood test showing her to be over the legal blood-alcohol limit, and she says without that evidence her conviction must be reversed. Price also contends the DUI statute is unconstitutionally vague by describing one form of proscribed conduct as "incapable of safely driving." We find those points to be unavailing and affirm the district court.
The prosecution of Price arose from a single-car wreck that happened sometime before 2:45 a.m. on June 4, 2016, on a rural road in Lyon County. Angelica Prestier and Raymond Peterson were driving in the vicinity when they saw Price walking along the road. They quickly came upon a sedan askew on the side of the road. So they stopped. The car had substantial damage to the driver's side. Nobody was in or around the vehicle. Connecting Price and the car, Prestier and Peterson took on the role of Good Samaritans. Prestier remained with the car and called 911, while Peterson drove back to get Price. He found Price, and they returned to the wreck.
In the meantime, Lyon County Deputy Steve Dall received a dispatch call at 2:46 a.m., arrived at the wreck, and spoke with Prestier. An emergency medical crew also responded. When Peterson returned to the scene with Price, an emergency medical technician examined Price and treated her for what appeared to be minor injuries to her forehead. He then turned Price over to Dall, who questioned Price while she sat in his patrol car. About 40 minutes later, Dall informed Price she was under arrest and placed her in handcuffs. During that time, at least two other officers had arrived and participated in the investigation of the mishap. At least one of them joined in the questioning of Price for a time. And one of the officers found a half empty bottle of vodka in the car.
After Dall drove Price to the law enforcement center, she declined to perform any field sobriety tests and refused a breath test. Dall then obtained a search warrant for a blood draw from Price. Dall took Price to a nearby hospital where medical personnel obtained a blood sample from Price at about 6:40 a.m. A later analysis of the sample showed Price had a blood-alcohol concentration of .17.
The State charged Price with driving under the influence in violation of K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 8-1567, as a second offense misdemeanor, and transporting an open container of alcohol, a misdemeanor violation of K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 8-1599. Price, through her lawyer, filed numerous pretrial motions. Pertinent to the appeal, Price sought to exclude as trial evidence any statements she made to Deputy Dall on the grounds that his questioning of her constituted a custodial interrogation and he never advised her of her Miranda rights. She also sought to exclude the admission of the blood test results. The district court excluded some of Price's statements but denied the motion to bar the blood test results.
The State revised the DUI charges, so Price faced alternative violations of K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 8-1567 for operating a motor vehicle with a blood-alcohol concentration of .08 or more and for operating a motor vehicle while incapable of doing so safely because of the consumption of alcohol. See K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 8-1567(a)(1), (a)(3). Price waived her right to a jury trial, and she and the State elected to try the case to the district court on stipulated facts. The stipulated factual record for trial consisted of various motions and memoranda previously submitted to the district court, police reports, the toxicology report and other materials related to the blood draw, transcripts from two pretrial hearings, and video recordings from the scene on June 4, 2016, made with cameras in two patrol cars. Based on the stipulated trial record, the district court found Price guilty as charged and imposed sentences consistent with the governing statutes.
On appeal, Price challenges only her conviction for driving under the influence and raises four points: (1) the district court erred in admitting some of her statements to Deputy Dall; (2) the district court erred in admitting the test results from the blood draw; (3) K.S.A. 2015 Supp. 8-1567(a)(3), proscribing driving a vehicle when unable to safely do so, is unconstitutionally vague; and (4) the State presented insufficient evidence to support her conviction on the alternative DUI charges. As we explain, the first, second, and fourth points are interconnected, so we look at them together to determine what legal relief, if any, may be due Price. We then turn to her constitutional challenge.
As to the statements, Deputy Dall testified that he never informed Price of her Miranda rights. See Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 444-45, 86 S. Ct. 1602, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694 (1966). Nobody else did, either. Government agents are required to inform a person in custody of those rights to avert impermissibly coercive interrogations and to preserve that person's protection against self-incrimination guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. 384 U.S. at 444-45. A person is considered "in custody" for that purpose if he or she has been formally arrested or has been deprived of his or her freedom in a significant way functionally equivalent to an arrest. Miranda , 384 U.S. at 444, 478-79. The accepted judicial test explores whether, under the circumstances, a reasonable person would conclude he or she could not terminate the questioning and leave. See Stansbury v. California , 511 U.S. 318, 323, 114 S. Ct. 1526, 128 L. Ed. 2d 293 (1994) (); State v. Warrior , 294 Kan. 484, 497, 277 P.3d 1111 (2012) ; State v. Fritschen , 247 Kan. 592, 601-03, 802 P.2d 558 (1990) ().
A district court should determine whether police questioning amounts to a custodial interrogation requiring Miranda warnings based on the totality of the circumstances. The Kansas Supreme Court has identified a set of factors geared toward making that determination. See Warrior , 294 Kan. at 496-97. The interaction between law enforcement officers and an individual may turn into a custodial interrogation even though it didn't start out that way.
To remedy the failure of law enforcement officers to inform a person in custody of his or her Miranda rights, the district court should preclude the State from using those statements as evidence against that person in its case-in-chief at trial. Oregon v. Elstad , 470 U.S. 298, 317, 105 S. Ct. 1285, 84 L. Ed. 2d 222 (1985) ; United States v. Smith , 831 F.3d 793, 798 (7th Cir. 2016). The remedy, then, does not prohibit prosecution but limits the evidence the government may use in that prosecution.
As we indicated, the district court found that Price was effectively "in custody" when Dall told her she was under arrest and placed her in handcuffs. The district court then suppressed statements Price made after her arrest. Price counters that she was actually in custody when the emergency medical technician delivered her to Deputy Dall at his specific request. There are fair arguments against both of those positions. We mention by way of example that while Price was sitting in the patrol car she asked Deputy Dall when she could leave. Deputy Dall did not respond to her request and simply continued the questioning by asking when she last had anything to drink. That exchange, particularly Deputy Dall's refusal to tell Price that she was free to leave in response to her direct question, would be indicative of a custodial interrogation, although not necessarily conclusively so if considered alone. We do not know what the emergency medical technician told Price when he took her to the patrol car. His explanation, if any, might have caused a reasonable person in Price's position to believe she no longer had the liberty to walk away from the scene.
Rather than wading into an intricate analysis of the circumstances to determine precisely when Deputy Dall's questioning of Price amounted to a custodial interrogation—an exercise that looks to be less than clear-cut—we prefer to wish the entire dispute away. We do that by assuming without deciding that Price is right on this issue even though that's probably incorrect. In turn, based solely on that assumption, we say for forensic purposes all of her statements to Deputy Dall and the other officers should not have been considered among the stipulated facts in the bench trial. That is the legal remedy due Price.
If the remaining evidence contained in the stipulated facts was sufficient to support Price's DUI conviction, then any error the district court may have made in deciding the motion to suppress the statements was legally harmless. We may analyze the evidence for that purpose because Price was tried in the district court on stipulated facts. Reviewing stipulated or agreed-upon facts requires no credibility determinations or weighing of conflicting evidence. We can perform that task just as well as the district court did. See In re Marriage of Stephenson and Papineau , 302 Kan. 851, 854, 358 P.3d 86 (2015).
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