Police Sobriety Checkpoints Upheld : Supreme Court Says Motorists’ Privacy Rights Not Violated

The privacy rights of motorists are not violated when police try to curb drunk driving by stopping them at sobriety checkpoints, the Supreme Court ruled today.

The 6-3 ruling upheld Michigan’s sobriety checkpoint program and, by extension, similar programs in most states.

(The decision will not affect California, where police in many jurisdictions as well as the California Highway Patrol use sobriety checkpoints, said Steve Kohler, a CHP spokesman. The California Supreme Court, he explained, had upheld the use of the checkpoints in a 1987 ruling.)

“No one can seriously dispute the magnitude of the drunken driving problem or the states’ interest in eradicating it,” Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote for the court.

“Conversely, the weight bearing on the other scale--the measure of the intrusion on motorists stopped briefly at sobriety checkpoints--is slight,” he added.

Drunk drivers killed 23,000 people nationwide last year. President Bush called drunk driving a problem “as crippling as crack” cocaine, and last December he asked state and local governments to step up the fight against drunken drivers.

Joining Rehnquist were Justices Byron R. White, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy. Justice Harry A. Blackmun joined in the result but not in Rehnquist’s majority opinion.

Justices William J. Brennan, Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens dissented.

“I do not dispute the immense social cost caused by drunken drivers, nor do I slight the government’s efforts to prevent such tragic losses,” Brennan wrote. But he added, “In the face of the ‘momentary evil’ of drunken driving, the court today abdicates its role as the protector of” the fundamental right of individual privacy.

In a separate dissenting opinion, Stevens said, “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, unannounced investigatory seizures.

“Sobriety checkpoints are elaborate, and disquieting, publicity stunts,” Stevens said. “This is a case that is driven by nothing more than symbolic state action--an insufficient justification for an otherwise unreasonable program of random seizures.”

Nadine Strosser, general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, said today’s ruling “strikes at the heart of the Fourth Amendment,” which bans unreasonable police searches and seizures.

“This is the first time in American history that the government is allowed to conduct searches and seizures with a view of enforcing criminal laws without any individualized suspicion at all that the person is committing or about to commit a crime,” she said.

In another decision today, the court allowed the Bush Administration to limit how much welfare aid some needy families receive.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said Social Security benefits paid to children must be considered in determining a family’s eligibility for benefits under the government’s Aid to Families with Dependent Children program.

The court also ruled that the government may impose severe fines against air polluters even when federal officials are slow to decide on proposals for cleaning up the atmosphere.

And it ruled that hospitals and nursing homes may sue in federal court to challenge how a state-run Medicaid program reimburses their costs.