As I was driving home tonight, I drove through what appeared to be a DUI checkpoint - police cars with lights on parked on either side of the road; road cones seperating lanes and a large parking area off to the side where more police cars and a police command vehicle were parked. However, the warning signs posted on the side of the road said, “License Check Ahead”.
Now, it did not appear that they were actually screening any vehicles to pull them over, nor did it appear that they had any cars pulled over as I passed. It appeared they were wrapping up what ever operation they had going on. (Although someone was videotaping all the cars as we passed by, with a TV news quality looking camera)
So, I don’t know what they were doing, but it got me thinking about the possibility of an actual drivers license checkpoint, similiar to the DUI checkpoint. Would this be legal? I know DUI checkpoints have passed courtroom challenges for reasons that I’m assuming has to do with public safety. I also know that drug checkpoints have been struck down in courts because (I believe) it wasn’t a safety issue so much as a ‘fishing’ for illegal activity issue.* So, would a ‘license ckeckpoint’ be legal, if we were to assume that is what they were doing?
*[sub]I welcome corrections to this if I’m wrong. Not that you need me to invite you to do so. Obviously.[/sub]
It probably depends on where you’re talking about… but I don’t see any problem with the police stopping people in California and checking for valid drivers licenses. IMHO, driving without a license is a safety issue… but IANAL.
That’s a dangerous assumption. Drugs like marijuana or cocaine, for example, are illegal. Despite that fact, the Supreme Court has held that random drug checkpoints are unconstitutional. (City of Indianapolis v. Edmond IIRC).
“Driving is a privilege” … that little line we all heard in Drivers Ed. class. Since driving without a license is an offense, it’s legal to verify that a driver has a license.
The trick is, it can only be done in one of two or three ways: (1) check when there is another violation warranting stopping the vehicle for; (2) run a checkpoint at which all drivers are checked for a valid license; or, debatably, (3) run a checkpoint at which a set-in-advance random array of checks is done (e.g., wave four cars through and check the fifth car, wave another four through and check the tenth, etc.).
The first is in connection with a “probable cause” stop; the second treats all drivers equally. The third may or may not fall afoul of the equal protection clause; the last I knew, it had been challenged in a lawsuit, and I never heard the outcome of that suit.
There’s plenty of case law regarding routine traffic stops. Some have alluded to a couple of U.S. Supreme Court cases involving DUI checks and drug-detecting checks, but so far as my (admittedly hasty) research has revealed, the specific question here (is a simple licensure check valid?) has not reached that Court. It has, however, been litigated in state and federal courts all over the place.
The results are not totally consistent and it is not nearly as simple as the following, but by and large the courts have upheld license-checking checkpoints, so long as they meet certain guidelines. For example, the method for choosing who gets stopped should be arbitrary, not “random” – a “random” method is, in the eyes of a lot of courts, too vulnerable to abuse by officers who will “randomly” choose to stop the cars of certain kinds of people only. Also, the check is often held invalid if it can be shown that it is really a pretext for some other law enforcement tactic, like looking for drugs.
The reasoning behind these cases is typically that the checkpoint serves a legitimate government purpose (protecting the public from the dangers presented by drivers who have not demonstrated their competence by obtaining a license), and this is not outweighed by the slight privacy intrusion involved in a brief stop to check your license. A few cases have gone the other way, though, including a 1993 Indiana Court of Appeals case and two 2001 Tennessee cases.
Bottom line is that this sort of checkpoint will usually be held valid. For those interested in the details and having access to a law library, see 116 A.L.R.5th 479.
I’ve read that one of the tactics that they use is to go after the people who freak out when they see the “License Check Ahead” sign and make an illegal U-turn or other traffic violation to avoid the checkpoint. The primary purpose of the checkpoint is to flush out people who have a reason to avoid the police.
That’s curious – U-turns are legal universally, right? They are here, unless posted anyway (we don’t have checkpoints*, though). Does making a perfectly legal U-turn constitute probable cause?
In South Texas, there are Border Patrol checkpoints approximately 75 miles from the Texas/Mexico border. They are on US 77, US281, I-35 and I-10, and probably other roads as well. At these checkpoints, all cars must stop, regardless of where they came from. Trips that originate in Texas must stop as well.
It has been my understanding that such checkpoints are legal because ALL cars must stop. However, my experience with them tells me otherwise. Sometimes, when I’ve gone through a checkpoint, I hardly slow down when I’m waved through. Other times, they’ve taken me out of the car, searched the trunk, knocked on the doors, etc. So, ALL cars stopping is a bit vague.