Indiana Implied Consent Law: Refusal, Suspension, and OWI

Under Indiana’s implied consent law, the moment you drive on an Indiana road you have agreed to take a breath, blood, or urine test if a law enforcement officer develops probable cause to believe you are operating while intoxicated. Say no, and the Bureau of Motor Vehicles suspends your license for one year, or two years if you have a prior OWI conviction, regardless of whether you are ever charged or convicted of anything.¹

How the Consent Is Triggered

Indiana Code 9-30-6-1 treats the act of operating a vehicle as implied consent to chemical testing.² You do not sign anything. You do not have to know the law exists. The consent attaches automatically.

What activates it is probable cause. Once an officer has reason to believe you have committed an OWI offense, the officer must offer you the chance to submit to a chemical test.³ Probable cause usually comes from some combination of erratic driving, the smell of alcohol, slurred speech, and poor performance on field sobriety tests. The officer’s observations have to meet a legal standard, not just a suspicion.

The test must be administered within three hours of the officer developing probable cause.³

What Counts as a Refusal

This is where drivers get tripped up. The officer can offer more than one chemical test, and you have to submit to each one. Agreeing to blow into a breath machine and then declining a blood draw still counts as a refusal under the statute.³ Partial cooperation is not cooperation.

Hedging, delaying, or asking to call a lawyer before deciding can also be treated as a refusal. The officer does not have to wait around.

One boundary worth knowing: if a driver is unconscious, the officer is not required to offer a test at all.³ Hospital staff who draw blood or take other samples from an unconscious patient must turn those samples and the results over to law enforcement on request, and the patient-physician privilege does not shield them in a criminal investigation.

How Long the Suspension Lasts

Refusal starts an administrative process at the BMV that runs independent of any criminal case. The officer files an affidavit of refusal, and the suspension follows.

Read the trigger carefully. The two-year suspension requires a prior OWI conviction. A prior refusal that never produced a conviction does not, by the plain text of the statute, elevate the current suspension to two years.¹

Because this is a BMV action, it goes into effect whether or not prosecutors ever file criminal charges and whether or not any charges result in conviction. The suspension runs on its own track.

Refusing Does Not End the OWI Case

A lot of drivers refuse testing on the theory that without a BAC number, the state has no case. That is wrong. Prosecutors can and do bring OWI charges built on the officer’s observations, field sobriety performance, dashcam and body camera footage, and witness statements.

Worse, the refusal itself is admissible at trial. Jurors tend to draw the obvious inference about why someone would decline a test that could have cleared them. So the refusal costs you a year of driving on the administrative side, and it hands the prosecution an argument on the criminal side.

Driving During the Suspension

Indiana courts can grant specialized driving privileges (sometimes called hardship privileges) so you can get to work, school, or medical care. For drivers who refused a chemical test, these privileges are generally off the table unless you agree to install an ignition interlock device, which requires a breath sample before the vehicle will start. Interlock devices carry installation and monthly monitoring fees that typically run several hundred dollars up front plus ongoing costs.

Reinstatement at the end of the suspension period is not automatic. You have to satisfy any court-ordered conditions, pay BMV reinstatement fees, and often file proof of insurance before your license comes back.

Challenging the Suspension

You have the right to contest an implied consent suspension in court. The petition goes to the court where OWI charges are pending, or if none have been filed, to a court in the county where the alleged offense or refusal occurred that has jurisdiction over OWI cases.⁴

The petition has to be in writing, verified by the person seeking review, and allege specific facts that contradict the officer’s probable cause affidavit.⁴ Generic objections will not get you a hearing. You need to point at concrete problems with the officer’s version of events.

The hearing is narrow. The court looks at two questions only:

Did the officer have probable cause to believe you were operating a vehicle in violation of Indiana’s OWI statutes?
Did you actually refuse to submit to a chemical test?

If the court answers no to either question, the suspension can be set aside.⁴ The statute does not set a filing deadline, but it entitles you to a “prompt judicial hearing,” and waiting weeks defeats the point. File quickly after the suspension notice arrives.

Blood Tests Require a Warrant

Indiana’s implied consent law has to operate inside limits the U.S. Supreme Court has set. Two decisions matter.

Birchfield v. North Dakota (2016) separated breath tests from blood tests. Warrantless breath tests are allowed after a lawful arrest for drunk driving because they are minimally intrusive. Blood tests are not. Drawing blood pierces the skin and produces a sample that can reveal far more than alcohol level, and the Court held that the Fourth Amendment does not permit states to criminally punish someone solely for refusing a warrantless blood test.⁵ Civil consequences like license suspension are still fair game.

In Missouri v. McNeely (2013), the Court rejected the argument that alcohol dissipating in the bloodstream, by itself, creates an emergency that lets officers skip the warrant requirement for a blood draw. Genuine exigent circumstances beyond ordinary dissipation can still justify a warrantless draw, but the default path for an officer who wants your blood over your objection is to call a judge for a warrant.

Commercial Drivers

If you hold a CDL, everything above gets harsher. Federal rules set the BAC threshold for operating a commercial motor vehicle at 0.04, half the standard 0.08 limit.⁶ Any detectable alcohol in your system behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle triggers an immediate 24-hour out-of-service order, and refusing a chemical test carries its own federal CDL disqualification separate from what Indiana does to your regular driving privileges. CDL disqualifications for refusal or OWI run in years, and a second offense can mean a lifetime disqualification. For a professional driver, a refusal can effectively end the career.

Insurance and the SR-22

The financial consequences stretch well past court fines. Insurance companies treat a refusal or an OWI conviction as high-risk behavior, and premium increases of two to three times your previous rate are common. Some carriers drop coverage altogether, pushing you into a specialty market at unfavorable rates.

Indiana may also require you to file an SR-22, a certificate from your insurer confirming you carry at least the state’s minimum liability coverage. The SR-22 must stay on file with the BMV for the required period, and if your insurer cancels the policy, the BMV finds out.⁷ A lapse triggers a new suspension. The requirement usually lasts several years, and once you add reinstatement fees, interlock costs, higher premiums, and SR-22 filing fees, the total cost of a refusal climbs into five figures over the following years.

If you are stopped and the officer asks for a chemical test, the choice is narrow and the consequences on either side are real. Talking to an Indiana defense attorney quickly after a refusal, ideally before the judicial hearing window closes, is the single most useful thing you can do.

1
Indiana General Assembly. Indiana Code 9-30-6-9 – Suspension of Driving Privileges
2
Indiana General Assembly. Indiana Code 9-30-6-1 – Chemical Test for Intoxication; Implied Consent
3
Indiana General Assembly. Indiana Code 9-30-6-2 – Probable Cause; Offer of Test
4
Indiana General Assembly. Indiana Code 9-30-6-10 – Judicial Hearing; Petition; Issues; Findings
5
Justia. Birchfield v. North Dakota, 579 U.S. ___ (2016)
6
eCFR. 49 CFR 382.201 – Alcohol Concentration
7
Bureau of Motor Vehicles. Suspension Reinstatement and Insurance Forms