After a Fatal Accident in Türkiye the Blood Sample Is Not Optional — what refusing the test actually costs

The rule sits in the third paragraph of Article 48 of the Highway Traffic Code (Law no. 2918). Where a person has been involved in a traffic accident causing injury or death — or a damage-only accident the police have attended — being tested is compulsory. The same paragraph then says what happens when you say no. A driver who disputes the reading of the technical device, or who will not permit the device to be used, is taken to the nearest forensic medicine institution, forensic physician, or health facility of the Ministry of Health, and blood, saliva or urine samples are taken.

The verbs are not permissive. There is no consent step in the paragraph and no procedure for declining. Both things usually happen in sequence on the same night: the refusal is written into a tutanak, and you are then driven to a hospital where the sample is taken anyway.

The fourth paragraph closes the gap people assume exists. Where a person has died, or has been injured too badly to blow into the device, samples are taken under the third paragraph in the same way. An unconscious driver has consented to nothing. The sample is still lawful, and it is still in the file.

Article 75 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CMK) governs internal bodily examination and the taking of blood or similar biological samples from a suspect. Its fifth paragraph is the protection most people have heard of: where the offence carries a maximum of less than two years' imprisonment, no internal examination may be performed and no blood, saliva, hair or nail samples may be taken.

Two things put that rule out of reach. First, KTK 48/3 applies Article 75 with the exception of its fifth paragraph; the exclusion is written into the Traffic Code in terms. Second, and more decisively, the threshold would not have helped you in any event. Causing death by negligence under Article 85/1 of the Penal Code carries two to six years; where more than one person died, or one or more died and one or more were injured, Article 85/2 carries two to fifteen years. Neither is under two years. That argument belongs to a minor roadside stop, not to a fatal file.

The seventh paragraph of CMK 75 reserves the alcohol-examination and blood-sampling provisions of special laws, and it is sometimes quoted as though it stripped the Code's protections out of traffic cases altogether. It does not. The special law here does the opposite: it applies Article 75 and subtracts only paragraph five. The safeguards in the other six paragraphs come with it.

Refusal is not a cheaper option. Since the amendment of 12 February 2026 it is the most expensive thing a driver can do at the roadside.

Set the first row against the second. Refusing costs six times the fine of a first positive reading and ten times the period of withdrawal — and the sample is taken regardless. The thresholds themselves, and the licence process running alongside the criminal case, are set out on drink and drug driving in Türkiye.

Because KTK 48/3 imports Article 75, the sampling has to satisfy it. Read the first paragraph closely. The taking of blood or similar biological samples may be ordered by a judge or court, on the prosecutor's or the victim's application or of its own motion; where delay would be prejudicial, by the prosecutor. Then the part that matters: the prosecutor's decision is submitted to a judge or court within twenty-four hours, the judge or court decides within twenty-four hours, and decisions that are not approved become void — the evidence obtained through them cannot be used.

That is checked on the file weeks later, not at the roadside. Three further paragraphs travel with it. Under 75/2 the intervention must carry no danger to health. Under 75/3 it may be performed only by a physician or another member of a health profession — not by an officer. Under 75/6 the decision is open to objection.

The questions are the ordinary ones put to any compelled evidence-gathering step: who ordered it, on what stated basis, inside what time, by whom it was carried out, and whether the paperwork follows the sample from the arm to the laboratory. The framework, and how a defect in it is raised, is on searches and seizure. One warning belongs here: the refusal record is written in Turkish and you may be asked to sign it. Sign nothing an interpreter has not read to you.

The fine and the licence are the visible cost. The cost inside the criminal file is larger and less obvious.

Under Article 22/3 of the Penal Code, where a driver foresaw the result but did not want it, the negligence is conscious — bilinçli taksir — and the sentence is increased by one third to one half. A recorded reading is the most reliable material a prosecutor has for that argument. A refusal does not remove the reading; it adds conduct to the record beside it.

Remand is the second place it shows. Causing death by negligence is not among the offences listed in CMK 100/3, so a remand request must be built on the general grounds: strong suspicion supported by concrete evidence, plus either concrete facts raising a suspicion of flight (CMK 100/2-a) or conduct raising strong suspicion that evidence will be destroyed, concealed or altered (CMK 100/2-b). A foreign driver with no settled address already faces the first. Refusing the test is the kind of conduct put under the second. Article 100/1 requires the measure to be proportionate to the sentence expected — an argument that is harder to make with a refusal in the file.

None of it changes because nobody died. The injury-only collision runs on the same third paragraph of Article 48; only the offence charged differs, and that is dealt with on traffic accidents causing injury.

What the reading eventually means for a sentence is settled elsewhere in the file — in the fault ratio, the expert report, and whether the negligence is characterised as ordinary or conscious. Those are the parts still open to argument, and they are set out on fatal road accidents in Türkiye.