Within the past week, courts have handed down two opinions which seem contradictory: the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the law allowing police to stop and ticket drivers for failing to buckle up, while the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against drug interdiction checkpoints. I think both decisions were legally correct.
Within the past week, courts have handed down two opinions which seem contradictory: the Indiana Supreme Court upheld the law allowing police to stop and ticket drivers for failing to buckle up, while the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against drug interdiction checkpoints. I think both decisions were legally correct.
The 4th Amendment prohibits government from engaging in “unreasonable” searches and seizures. Traditionally, courts have held that it is “unreasonable” to stop or seize someone without an individualized reason to believe that the person being stopped has committed a wrongful act. In other words, there must be “probable cause” to believe that this particular person is a transgressor.
The courts have allowed an exception to this rule in the case of sobriety checkpoints, because drunk drivers pose an immediate threat to the safety of others on the highways. Sobriety checkpoints are allowed for the sole purpose of identifying those who are operating a motor vehicle in an impaired state. Had the drug checkpoints been an attempt to stop people from driving while under the influence of drugs, they would undoubtedly have been upheld. But that was not their purpose. As Judge Posner (hardly a “liberal” judge) noted:
?”Indianapolis does not claim to be concerned with protecting highway safety
?against drivers high on drugs. Its program of drug roadblocks belongs to the
?genre of general programs of surveillance which invade privacy wholesale
?in order to discover evidence of crime.”
Drug checkpoints are no different from allowing a policeman to enter and search every other house on your block, or to stop and frisk every third pedestrian crossing Meridian at Washington Street. Cars are not stopped to prevent dangerous driving; they are not stopped because an officer has any reason at all to suspect wrongdoing. They are stopped simply because they are on the highway. They turn the 4th Amendment upside-down: instead of insisting that government justify interrupting the travel of law-abiding citizens, checkpoints make citizens prove that they are law-abiding.
The seatbelt law–despite being one of the more offensive manifestations of our ever-solicitous “nanny state”–does require probable cause to believe that you haven’t buckled up. Thus it is not facially unconstitutional. Although it may well end up being applied in an unconstitutional manner, that issue was not before the court. Many laws can be misused; that is not sufficient basis for striking them down, however defective they may be from a policy standpoint. ???
Proponents of these measures are certainly well-meaning. They intend to protect us from harm, and they are prepared to trade away our traditional, time-honored freedoms for 45 pot smokers and 9 folks in possession of cocaine [Indianapolis Star, July 8]. They are willing to risk selective enforcement of the seatbelt law–and unwilling to respect our personal autonomy–in order to save us from death or injury on the highways.
The goals are laudable. But with all due respect, the price they want the rest of us to pay is just too high.