Kuwait Court of Cassation principle number 182

Summary: - Driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcoholic beverages, narcotics or psychotropic substances. It permits any police officer to make an arrest. Article 44 of Law 67 of 1976 concerning Traffic. Rule: Whereas Article 44 of Decree-Law No. 67 of 1976 concerning Traffic, as amended, provides: "Any police officer may arrest anyone who commits any of the following acts: (1) Driving a motor vehicle under the influence of alcoholic beverages, narcotics or psychotropic substances ...... etc." It is also established that whenever an arrest is lawful, a search following it and necessitated by the circumstances of the incident is lawful. Whereas it is apparent from the papers and the judgment’s findings concerning the facts of the case that the acts established against the appellant constitute the offence of driving a motor vehicle with one metal number plate, a misdemeanour criminalised by Article 35/1 of the aforementioned Decree-Law No. 67 of 1976 and punishable by imprisonment for a term not exceeding fifteen days and a fine not exceeding twenty-five dinars, or either of those two penalties, and whereas the appellant was apprehended for that offence upon being found in an abnormal condition, his arrest by the police officer was lawful, and the ensuing search justified by the circumstances was lawful. The papers establish that the Public Prosecution—after the appellant was brought before it following his arrest while in an abnormal condition—referred him and the seized items to the General Department of Criminal Evidence to take samples from him and analyse them to ascertain the nature of the substance he had taken and under whose influence he was while driving the car, and to determine the offence he had committed. Accordingly, this procedure is a form of search necessitated by the circumstances of the incident and was conducted in accordance with the law. The challenged judgment addressed the appellant’s plea of invalidity of the arrest and search and rejected it on the basis of its conviction that there were grounds to stop the appellant to take legal procedures against him after the police officer saw him driving his car with one metal number plate and in an abnormal condition. It reached the same conclusion, rejecting his defence based on the invalidity of those procedures and giving grounds for their validity. The complaint against it concerning those procedures, or its reliance on the testimony of the person who conducted them and on the findings of the General Department of Criminal Evidence’s report concerning analysis of the sample taken from the appellant’s urine, is therefore unsound.