An Urbandale man accused of killing a popular Iowa cyclist while driving drunk wants to block key evidence from being introduced at his upcoming trial over precise details that wereleft out of a search warrant.
A lawyer representing Jonathan Leyva Rodriguez filed a motion in late February claiming the results oftesting for blood alcohol content performedon two vials of Leyva's blood should be left out of court because some information required by Iowa law was left out of a search warrant application to draw the sample.
Defense attorney Daniel Northfield wrote in hismotion that the search warrant isn't valid because it did not contain the address or workplace of Officer Michael Dixon, the senior police officer who gave a sworn statement hours after the crash that prompted a judge to sign off on the warrant to draw blood. Under Iowa law, an application must contain the "name and address of all persons" whose testimony was used by law enforcement officials to secure a warrant, he wrote.
The testing on Leyva's bloodis likely critical to prosecutors, as it would establish exactly whether or not his blood alcohol content was above the legal limit of .08 when he allegedly struck Franck, said Robert Rigg, a criminal defense professor at Drake University Law School. A preliminary breath test that Leyva voluntarily took after the crash showed his BAC at .213, but that result is not admissible in the trial against him.