Decision here.
Grassi, driving whilst drunk, ran his car off the roadway for no apparent reason (other than his drunkenness). He was seriously hurt in the accident and transported to the hospital where he remained unconscious for several hours. His passenger was killed.
Like most calls this big, the investigation involved more than one officer. There were at least two officers investigating at the scene (one who was an accident reconstructionist, one who was not but was the first responding officer), both of whom concluded that there was no external cause of the accident and that the driver had just followed the fog line off of the roadway, which is something drunks sometimes do. There was a supervisor, who did a fine job of delegating other tasks. And there was the officer who the supervisor sent to the hospital, with the instructions to obtain a blood draw if he determined that alcohol was a factor in this accident.
The officer who went to the hospital was apparently assigned this task before the accident investigation had been completed (which only makes sense). Even though Grassi was still unconscious, the officer could smell a strong odor of alcohol from his breath. He ordered a couple of blood draws, both of which were completed after the accident reconstructionist had determined that the accident was caused by Grassi's bad driving. The blood test later revealed that Grassi was drunk (the decision doesn't tell us just how drunk, but over the legal limit).
Grassi was convicted of Vehicular Homicide, Manslaughter, and DUI. He appealed his conviction launching a somewhat mystifying attack on the fellow officer rule. His argument goes like this: the fellow officer rule allows one cop to act on information from another, but at the time that the third trooper was assigned to go to the hospital to potentially do a blood draw, the accident investigation wasn't completed yet so there was no probable cause. Also, the officers at the accident scene didn't necessarily communicate all of their findings directly to the one at the hospital. Therefore, the blood draw was done without probable cause in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
The Supreme Court explains that the fellow officer rule allows officers to act on information known to other officers related to the same investigation, so long as two requirements are met: 1- the officers have to be acting as part of a coordinated investigation, and 2- the police must collectively possess the information required to justify the action at the time the action is taken. Given that those two conditions are met, the courts aren't going to nit-pick who told who what when. The courts also aren't going to ask us to make search and seizure decisions based only on the information available at the time that we were assigned to an investigation (which is what Grassi wanted); instead, we can use the information available at the time that we conduct the search or seizure.
In this case, the officers were all obviously acting as part of a coordinated investigation. And the information known to the police at the time supported probable cause, so the blood draw was good and Grassi's conviction was affirmed.
That "coordinated investigation" part is what differentiates this case from wall stops. In a case of a wall stop (where investigating officers tell another officer to find their own reason to stop someone who they think is a Bad Guy), the officer making the stop is specifically NOT acting as part of a coordinated investigation. By withholding their suspicions (or by telling the officer to ignore their suspicions and find his own), the investigators are specifically cutting the officer out of the coordinated investigation, and so the fellow officer rule can not be used to justify wall stops (that's from a case where the officer making the stop tried to justify the stop by using a traffic violation that wasn't actually a violation).
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