§ 18.04 AUTOMOBILE INSPECTIONS AND CHECKPOINTS

• Jurisdiction: United States

§ 18.04. Automobile Inspections and Checkpoints³⁰

[A] Automobile License and Vehicle Registration Inspections

Automobiles have long been treated differently — and, from a Fourth Amendment perspective, less protectively—than homes and many other forms of personal property. The Supreme Court has stated that motorists have a lesser expectation of privacy in their automobiles, in part because motor vehicles are the subject of extensive regulation.³¹ Every state, of course, requires vehicles to be registered and their operators to be licensed. Moreover, each state and most local communities have regulations regarding the use and maintenance of automobiles.

Police officers frequently stop motorists on the road to issue traffic citations, presumably based on probable cause. But, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, police officers began to stop motorists without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, in order to conduct random driver's license and vehicle registration inspections.

The Supreme Court considered such vehicle-use inspections for the first time in Delaware v. Prouse.³² In Prouse, an officer conducting a random driver's license and registration check, stopped P's vehicle. After the stop, the officer observed marijuana in plain view inside the vehicle. The Supreme Court held that the search violated the Fourth Amendment because the officer did not have a right to order the driver to pull over to conduct the license/registration inspection. It reached this conclusion by balancing the intrusion on the driver's interests "against [the] promotion of legitimate governmental interests."

In the latter regard, the Court agreed "that the States have a vital interest in ensuring that only those qualified to do so are permitted to operate motor vehicles, that these vehicles are fit for safe operation, and hence that licensing, registration, and vehicle inspection requirements are being observed."³³ On the other side of the scale, the Court was troubled, first, by the fact that the officer "was not acting pursuant to any standards, guidelines, or procedures pertaining to document spot checks, promulgated by either his department or [the state]." Therefore, the risk of arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement was considerable.

Second, the Court questioned the wisdom of random stops. "Absent some empirical data to the contrary," the Court stated, "it must be assumed that finding an unlicensed driver among those who commit traffic violations [for which there is, therefore, probable cause to make the stop] is a much more likely event than finding an unlicensed driver by choosing randomly from the entire universe of drivers." The Court assumed in the absence of such data that the "contribution to highway safety made by discretionary stops selected from among drivers generally will . . . be marginal at best." In disapproving of the procedure in this case, the Court announced that:

except in those situations in which there is at least articulable and reasonable suspicion that a motorist is unlicensed or that an automobile is not registered, or that either the vehicle or an occupant is otherwise subject to seizure for violation of law, stopping an automobile and detaining the driver in order to check his driver's license and the registration of the automobile are unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.

The Court did not rule out the possibility that suspicionless license/registration inspections would be upheld under different circumstances. In important dictum, it stated that "[t]his holding does not preclude [a state] . . . from developing methods for spot checks that involve less intrusion or that do not involve the unconstrained exercise of discretion." The implication of this is that routine, warrantless, suspicionless checks are permissible if safeguards are devised to assure that "persons in automobiles on public roadways [do] not for that reason alone have their travel and privacy interfered with at the unbridled discretion of police officers." Specifically, according to Prouse, "[q]uestioning of all oncoming traffic at roadblock-type stops is one possible alternative."

[B] Automobile Checkpoints

[1] Sobriety Checkpoints

Are sobriety checkpoints—at which the police randomly, without individualized suspicion, stop motorists to check drivers for evidence of intoxication—constitutional? Law enforcement officials were once concerned that the Supreme Court might bar such suspicionless checkpoints. This concern seemed plausible in light of the Court's holdings in Delaware v. Prouse³⁴ in which it invalidated a suspicionless driver's license and registration check, and United States v. Brignoni-Ponce,³⁵ in which the Court disapproved of suspicionless, roving border patrol stops of cars near the Mexican border.

Nonetheless, the Supreme Court upheld a suspicionless highway sobriety checkpoint in Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz.³⁶ In Sitz, Michigan state police devised guidelines for conducting sobriety checkpoints. In the only implementation of the state's procedures, 126 vehicles were stopped, and the drivers were briefly examined for signs of intoxication. On average, each detention took 25 seconds. Two drivers who appeared to be intoxicated were required to move out of the traffic flow, to another point where a second officer could check their licenses and conduct sobriety tests. One of these drivers was arrested. Another motorist, who attempted to break through the checkpoint, was also arrested.

The state courts ruled that this sobriety checkpoint was unconstitutional. In reaching this result, a lower court applied a three-pronged test set out in Brown v. Texas,³⁷ in which the Court invalidated a suspicionless seizure of a person on the street. The lower court held that, although the state's interest in curbing drunken driving was "grave and legitimate" (the first Brown prong³⁸), the checkpoint program was ineffective and, therefore, did not significantly advance the public interest (the second prong). Also, the lower court determined that the overall intrusion on drivers' liberty (the third factor) was considerable: the objective intrusion (a 25-second delay) was minimal, but the subjective intrusion was substantial, because the checkpoint generated fear and surprise among motorists in much the same way that roving border patrols were condemned by the Supreme Court in Brignoni-Ponce.

The Supreme Court disagreed. Chief Justice Rehnquist, for the Court, held that the sobriety checkpoint did not violate the Fourth Amendment insofar as it pertained to the initial stop and associated preliminary questioning and observation of each motorist. The Court did not address the legitimacy of the detention of motorists for more extensive field sobriety tests, which it stated "may...