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GARCIA v. STATE11/14/1997
In these consolidated appeals, we must apply Alaska Criminal Rule 45(c) to a situation that is not specifically addressed in the rule. As we explain in more detail below, the three defendants in this case were each charged with driving while intoxicated. After the Department of Public Safety took administrative action against their driver's licenses, the district court dismissed the criminal charges on double jeopardy grounds. These charges were reinstated several months later, after we decided an unrelated appeal (State v. Zerkel) that involved the same double jeopardy issue.
The question is how Rule 45 should have been calculated when the district court resumed jurisdiction over the defendants' cases. We hold that, under these circumstances, Rule 45's speedy trial "clock" was reset to Day 1 when jurisdiction over the defendants' cases returned to the district court. Further, because the defendants filed suppression motions, an additional period of 30 days was excluded from the Rule 45 calculation. For these reasons, we conclude that Rule 45 was not violated, and we therefore affirm the defendants' convictions.
In late 1994 and early 1995, Noel Garcia, George Morange, and Richard Rutan were each charged in the Seward district court with driving while intoxicated (DWI), AS 28.35.030(a). While the defendants were awaiting trial, the Department of Public Safety administratively revoked their driver's licenses. Following this administrative action against their licenses, the defendants asked the district court to dismiss the pending DWI prosecutions. They asserted that the revocation of their licenses constituted a "punishment" for the act of driving while intoxicated and, thus, any additional criminal prosecution based on the same incident would violate the guarantees against double jeopardy contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and in Article I, Section 9 of the Alaska Constitution. The district court agreed with the defendants and dismissed their DWI cases. The State appealed these dismissals.
All of this happened while this court was actively considering the same double jeopardy issue in a group of consolidated cases now known as State v. Zerkel. The State's appeal of the three dismissals in this case was held in abeyance pending our decision in Zerkel. On July 28, 1995, this court held that administrative suspension or revocation of a driver's license based on the driver's act of driving while intoxicated or refusing to submit to a breath test did not constitute a "punishment" for double jeopardy purposes, and thus the driver could later be prosecuted for a criminal offense based on the same conduct. State v. Zerkel, 900 P.2d 744 (Alaska App. 1995).
Within a few weeks of our decision, the Seward district court reinstated the criminal charges against Garcia, Morange, and Rutan. Almost immediately, the defendants filed motions to suppress their Intoximeter results on the grounds that the machine used to test their breath had not been properly calibrated.
However, the district court acted prematurely when it reinstated the charges against the three defendants: jurisdiction over the defendants' cases had not yet returned to the district court. A petition for hearing was filed in Zerkel, and thus our decision had not yet become final.
While the Zerkel petition for hearing was still pending, the Seward district court recognized its jurisdictional error and withdrew its orders reinstating the defendants' prosecutions. The defendants' cases were again dismissed (with the State's appeal pending).
On December 4, 1995, the supreme court denied the petition for hearing in Zerkel. On J
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