With all due respect regarding her intent, the only rational response to Gov. Chris Gregoire’s call for implementing sobriety checkpoints to battle drunken driving is: Put a cork in it. Please.
The governor on Monday proposed the checkpoints for high-accident areas. Law enforcement and Mothers Against Drunk Driving support sobriety checkpoints, while civil libertarians vowed a battle in the Legislature and in the courts. The American Civil Liberties Union said the plan would violate the state’s strong protections against “suspicionless” searches. The ACLU is right. Police stopping cars without cause is a violation of our civil rights.
In 1990, a divided U.S. Supreme Court upheld Michigan’s use of such checkpoints, after the Michigan Supreme Court found they violated the Fourth Amendment prohibition of unreasonable searches.
In an article about sobriety checkpoints, sociologist David J. Hanson summed up the decision: “Acknowledging that such roadblocks violate a fundamental constitutional right, Chief Justice Rehnquist argued that they are necessary in order to reduce drunk driving. That is, he argued that the end justifies the means. Attorney and law professor Lawrence Taylor refers to this as ‘the DUI exception to the Constitution.’ ”
Sobriety checkpoints do, in fact, reduce DUI-related accidents and fatalities. However, and it’s a big however, such checkpoints are not the only way to do that.
The Washington State Patrol uses periodic “emphasis patrols” to crack down on drunk drivers. They work. Trooper Kirk Rudeen, a WSP spokesman, reported that in Snohomish, Skagit, Whatcom and Island counties, traffic fatalities on state roads dropped nearly 30 percent in 2007 from the year before. Drunken driving arrests were up about 22 percent. Traffic fatalities were also down statewide, he said.
The recent re-arrest of a 51-year-old Lynnwood man clearly shows where the state’s DUI emphasis needs to be: More stringent penalties and oversight following a conviction.
Robert Castle was arrested in late December after he ran into a car and sped off, stopping only when forced by heavy traffic. The convicted felon had three outstanding warrants, including two for attempting to elude police and one for a prior DUI case.
Castle had been arrested 15 times for drunk driving and has five DUI convictions.
It’s not that drunk drivers aren’t being caught, they are. Often repeatedly. They aren’t, however, being kept off the road.
The invasiveness of sobriety checkpoints cannot be justified. Emphasis patrols successfully target and ticket drunk drivers. It’s making “the punishment fit the crime” that needs work.
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