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State v. Houpt6/1/2004
An amended information was filed on April 28, 2003, charging Houpt with two counts of motor vehicle homicide pursuant to Neb. Rev. Stat. § 28-306 (Cum. Supp. 2002) (a Class IIIA felony), based on his alleged operation of a motor vehicle in violation of Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,196 (Cum. Supp. 2002) (driving under the influence of alcoholic liquor) and Neb. Rev. Stat. § 60-6,213 (Reissue 1998) (reckless driving). The charges against Houpt related to an incident that occurred in the early morning hours of April 16, 2002, in Lincoln County east of North Platte, Nebraska, on Interstate 80, which incident resulted in the deaths of two North Platte police officers.
Houpt filed several pretrial motions seeking to determine the admissibility of and to suppress the results of a blood alcohol test. The district court denied Houpt's motions and admitted the test results at trial. We discuss further details of Houpt's motions and the court's rulings thereon as necessary below in the analysis portion of this opinion.
A jury trial was held April 29 through May 1, 2003. Because Houpt does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence to support his convictions, we only generally set forth the evidence at trial as it relates to the events of April 16, 2002, and set forth such further details as are necessary to the resolution of this appeal in our analysis below. The evidence at trial showed that on the night of April 15, 2002, and in the early morning hours of April 16, Houpt, Steve Reeves, Ross Hilsman, and Zachary Peters, all fellow North Platte police officers, were riding around in a vehicle driven by Houpt and were consuming alcohol. The record shows that Hilsman drove the vehicle for a period before the accident, because he was more familiar with the area where they were; however, a verbal exchange led Houpt to become the driver of the vehicle again. After this switch of drivers, there was some tension among the occupants of the vehicle. Houpt was traveling west on the Interstate east of North Platte when he began driving at a high rate of speed. Reeves, the front passenger, testified that Houpt was driving a little over 100 miles per hour. Reeves asked Houpt to slow down, and Reeves reached over and shifted the vehicle into neutral. Reeves testified that he shifted the vehicle into neutral to "stop the car" because he was concerned for his safety and the fact that they might be stopped by law enforcement. Houpt began to brake, and the vehicle skidded for a distance in its lane of travel before it left the roadway and ultimately crashed in a ditch on the other side of a service road fence on the north side of the Interstate, during which process the front passenger, Reeves, was trapped under the vehicle and the rear passengers, Hilsman and Peters, were ejected from the vehicle. Peters was pronounced dead at the scene of the accident, and Hilsman died later from his injuries. Houpt flagged down a truckdriver, and with the help of this individual and the help of another truckdriver who stopped at the scene, they were able to lift the vehicle off Reeves. Law enforcement personnel from the Lincoln County sheriff's office responded to the scene. The Nebraska State Patrol was contacted to conduct the accident investigation. Houpt was transported to the Great Plains Regional Medical Center (the hospital) in North Platte, where blood was drawn from Houpt for purposes of conducting a blood alcohol test.
Accident reconstruction experts for the Nebraska State Patrol calculated that the vehicle had been traveling at a speed somewhere between 93 and 109 miles per hour at the time of the accident. The vehicle had been tracking in a straight line within the driving lane and then moved abruptly to the right, leaving the r
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