DUISobriety-checkpoints
First Sobriety Checkpoint System to Combat Drunk Driving
Father of Sobriety Checkpoints Weaves a Great Story. Highlights of a Police Chief's 30 Years on the Beat.
Burlingame Police Chief Fred Palmer stands 5-foot-8 and packs 160 firm pounds on a bantam body he keeps in shape with a regimen of running and other exercise.
He likes to joke that the chief's job he's held for 20 years has "beaten me down since I was 6-foot-4 and weighed 220 pounds."
Palmer, 57, has been tossing that line around a lot in recent days, since he announced he's retiring from the department he has served since 1963, when he was hired as a dispatcher after his discharge from the Army's Military Police.
He's best known in California law enforcement circles as the chief who in the late 1980s initiated the state's first sobriety checkpoint system to combat drunk driving. He set it up in such a way that it withstood a constitutional challenge by civil liberties groups and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Palmer recalls, however, that the politicking behind the scenes was intense over whether Burlingame or the CHP should be the first department to go forward with such a program.
"Critics thought we were a podunk police department that was going to screw it up for everybody, but we did our homework," boasts the chief.
Palmer, member of a marksman's team in his Army days, fired his police revolver only once in the line of duty. He shot a fleeing felon in the leg who, in one of those split-second decisions cops are often called on to make, Palmer mistakenly had thought was about to draw a gun on him.
The man he shot, an ex-con who had a reputation for carrying a weapon, was happy that Palmer had a marksman's eye. "He later thanked me for not killing him," the chief recalls.
Palmer, popular both with police colleagues and news reporters, prides himself on a long-standing policy of getting out accurate and truthful information to the media and the public.
But there was one time, he confesses, that he flat-out lied to the press and he makes no apologies, because he believed a young kidnap victim's life was at stake. The lie came only a few months after Palmer was named chief, during tense negotiations with the kidnapers of Niels Legallet, the 11-year-old scion of a wealthy pioneer California family. Palmer told the press there had been no phone contact with the kidnapers. "The kidnapers threatened to send the boy's fingers back to us if I revealed we talked to them."
Things turned out OK when Palmer's newly created SWAT team rescued the youngster from a motel and arrested his captors. The amiable, gregarious chief was amused by a local newspaper's article on his impending retirement in which it was noted that over the span of his career law enforcement, culture had largely switched from donuts to bagels and cappuccino. "Isn't that something to be remembered for?" he laughs.
But the chief, who will be honored by the city at a June 13 retirement party, says the most significant change in police work since he started has been technological. For one thing, police have progressed from handwritten reports -- sometimes a challenge to read -- to laptop computers.
Palmer recalls that when Burlingame PD bought its first video camera 25 years ago, a two-way mirror was installed in a tiny closet next to the interrogation room.
One day, as then-Detective Palmer scrunched inside the closet taping an interview through the mirror, the detective questioning the suspect suddenly leaned back in his office chair "and just kept going until he hit the floor on his butt."
The interrogation collapsed as well, when the suspect heard Palmer laughing uproariously inside the closet.
-- Palmer's retirement party is set for 6 p.m. June 13 at Burlingame's Hyatt Regency Hotel. Tickets are $42 per person. Call 692-8440.
Friday, May 23, 1997 Page P1, 1997 San Francisco Chronicle
By Bill Workman
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California DUI Laws and Sobriety Checkpoints
Short after a 1984 California Attorney General's Opinion set out what were intended to be strict guidelines for the legality of drunk driving roadblocks, police began using them to apprehend drunk drivers.
Roadblocks carried out pursuant to those strict guidelines* have been approved by the California Supreme Court (Ingersoll v Palmer (1987) 43 C3d 1321, 241, CR42). In this 4-3 decision the court stated, "We conclude that within certain limitations a sobriety checkpoint may be operated in a manner consistent with the federal and state Constitutions." The decision stressed a theme of "balancing the need to search against the need to search entrails".
In 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court also gave general approval to the use of roadblocks to enforce drunk driving laws (Michigan State Police Dept. v Sitz (1990) 496 U.S. 444, 110 S.Ct.2481, 110 L.Ed.2d 412, 47 CrL (BNA) 2155).
The court's decision in Ingersoll was based upon this reason. The court stated that the primary purpose of a roadblock is to deter drunk driving, rather than to arrest offenders, And that therefore Fourth Amendment considerations are not involved.
On the lack of any evidence showing that roadblocks will serve the stated purpose of deterrence, the court stated, at p. 1339:
It would be presumptuous in the extreme for this court to prohibit the use of an otherwise permissible and potentially effective procedure merely because its effectiveness is at the present time largely untested.
Statistics for 1990 C.H.P. roadblocks were published in 1992 in California Master Plan to Reduce Alcohol and Drug Abuse: 1992 (Sacramento, CA; Department of Alcohol and Drug Program, Jan. 1992) p B-88. According to this report, the C.H.P. conducted 84 roadblocks during 1990, with only 599 arrests for drunk driving. The cost was nearly $250,000. That's about 7 arrests per roadblock, at a cost of over $400. for each arrest, for the roadblock alone.
*Ingersoll guidelines fall under these general headings:
- Decision Making at the Supervisory Level
- Limits of Discretion of Field Officers
- Maintenance of Safety Conditions
- Reasonable Location
- Time and Duration
- Indicia of Official Nature of Roadblock
- Length and Nature of Detention
- Advance Publicity
The Ingersoll court also strongly hinted that Vehicle Code section 21, vesting authority for traffic control with the state, would prevent the establishment of any permanent roadblock location.
Other References:
Curbing the Drunk Driver Under the Fourth amendment: The
Constitutionality of Roadblock Seizures (1983) 71 Georgetown L.J.
1457-1486.
Sobriety Checkpoint Roadblocks: Constitutional in Light of Delaware v
Prouse? (1984) 28 St Louis U.L.J. 813.
Tarantino, J., "The .10 Percent Solution - Warrantless Sobriety
Checkpoints" the Champion, XII No. 1, Jan./Feb 1988 (Washington, D.C.:
N.A.C.D.L.)39.
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California DUI Sobriety Checkpoints – Constitutionality of DUI Roadblocks
Attorney Lawrence Taylor explains the constitutionality of DUI roadblocks.
Have you ever wondered how police can stop you at a DUI roadblock (aka "sobriety checkpoint")? Doesn't the Constitution require them to have "probable cause before stopping you"? Yes and no.
The Constitution of the United States clearly says that police can't just stop someone and conduct an investigation unless there are "articulable facts" indicating possible criminal activity. So how can they do exactly that with drunk driving roadblocks? Good question. And it was raised in the case of Michigan v. Sitz, in which the Michigan Supreme Court striking down DUI roadblocks as unconstitutional. In a 6-3 decision, however, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the Michigan court, holding that they were constitutionally permissible.
Chief Justice Rehnquist began his majority opinion by admitting that DUI sobriety checkpoints do, in fact, constitute a "seizure" within the language of the Fourth Amendment. In other words, yes, it appears to be a blatant violation of the Constitution. However, he continued, it's only a little one, and something has to be done about the "carnage" on the highways caused by drunk drivers. The "minimal intrusion on individual liberties," Rehnquist wrote, must be "weighed" against the need for -- and effectiveness of -- DUI roadblocks. In other words, the ends justify the means.
The dissenting justices pointed out that the Constitution doesn't make exceptions: The sole question is whether the police had probable cause to stop the individual driver. As Justice Brennan wrote, "That stopping every car might make it easier to prevent drunken driving... is an insufficient justification for abandoning the requirement of individualized suspicion... The most disturbing aspect of the Court's decision today is that it appears to give no weight to the citizen's interest in freedom from suspicionless investigatory seizures."
Rehnquist's justification for ignoring the Constitution rested on the assumption that DUI roadblocks were "necessary" and "effective." Are they? As Justice Stevens wrote in another dissenting opinion, the Michigan court had already reviewed the statistics on DUI sobriety checkpoints/roadblocks: "The findings of the trial court, based on an extensive record and affirmed by the Michigan Court of Appeals," he wrote, "indicate that the net effect of sobriety checkpoints on traffic safety is infinitesimal and possibly negative."
The case was sent back to the Michigan Supreme Court to change its decision accordingly. But the Michigan Supreme Court sidestepped Rehnquist by holding that DUI checkpoints, though now permissible under the U.S. Constitution, were not permissible under the Michigan State Constitution, and ruled again in favor of the defendant -- in effect saying to Rehnquist, "If you won't protect our citizens, we will." A small number of states have since followed Michigan's example.
Mr. Taylor is an attorney with the Law Offices of Lawrence Taylor and author of the standard text on DUI litigation, Drunk Driving Defense, 6th edition.
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