Police officers often ask drivers suspected of drunken driving to submit to a Breathalyzer test. In Minnesota and 12 other states, however, a driver’s refusal to submit to that test is an independent criminal offense. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to decide this spring whether those laws violate the Fourth Amendment by depriving individuals of their right to be protected from unlawful searches and seizures.
Minnesota police arrested William Robert Bernard, the petitioner, for drunken driving in 2012. Police officers observed Bernard and two other men—all of whom appeared severely intoxicated—trying to pull a boat out of the Mississippi River with a pickup truck. No one was in the truck when the officers arrived, but Bernard was seen walking between the boat and the truck, holding the vehicle’s keys, and wearing nothing but his underwear.
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