United States v. Mary Mae Harvey, United States of America v. Wallace Chase

In this consolidated appeal, Harvey and Chase contest their convictions for involuntary manslaughter. Both convictions arose from alcohol-related highway accidents on Indian reservations. Each appeal presents the primary and common issue of whether the results of blood alcohol tests should have been suppressed when neither defendant was formally arrested at the time the blood samples were taken. We hold that Appellant Harvey should have been arrested by the authorities prior to the taking of the sample, and we therefore reverse. Appellant Chase, however, was so incapacitated as to obviate the need of a prior arrest and we affirm the judgment in his case.

I. FACTS

A. Harvey

On October 8, 1981, Mary Mae Harvey, a White Mountain Apache Indian, was driving a truck with a friend and the friend’s daughter on the Fort Apache Reservation, about four miles outside McNary, Arizona. The truck crossed the center line and hit a van head-on, killing the driver of the van.

Ms. Harvey was taken to a hospital about an hour and a half after the accident. Investigator Garcia of the local Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) office, who had been at the scene of the accident, arrived at the hospital…