Sobriety Checkpoints Coming to Texas
by Dr. Tony Magana
Texas had been one of eleven states that felt sobriety checkpoints were a violation of right against unreasonable search and seizures guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment of the United States. Now Texas Senate Bill 298 sponsored by Senator John Carona (R-Dallas) which will allow sobriety checkpoints in Texas has passed the Senate and appears on the way to becoming law.
The Senator had previously opposed the use of checkpoints but says the new measure will save 300 lives a year. The bill requires that stops be videotaped and audio-recorded. Police cannot ask a driver for information or search a vehicle without having a clear indication that the driver is intoxicated.
In order to set up a checkpoint a previous history of significant alcohol related accidents and arrests in the area within the past 12 months must be established. A sheriff, mayor, or captain for the Texas Highway Patrol must approve the plan. Before the checkpoint is started an announcement of the the plan’s date and time but not location must be publicized via the media to discourage drunk driving. Checkpoints cannot last more than four hours and cannot be repeated in within the same mile for a 12 month period of time. Checkpoints are prohibited on limited access or controlled-access highways, overpasses, bridges or causeways, on single ingress or egress from a designated area, and in rural counties with a population of less than 250,000.
In 1990 the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of sobriety check points in Michigan. Chief Justice Rehnquist admitted that they did infringe on constitutional rights but that the state interest in protecting the public by reducing drunk driving outweighed a minor infringement. In a significant dissension, Justice Brennan said the the Constitution did not allow exceptions to the requirement in the Constitution for “individualized suspicion”.
In June 1994, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (State v. Holt) ruled that sobriety checkpoints were unconstitutional in Texas because no statewide guidelines existed for properly conducting checkpoints. But the Court did not rule that the proposal of sobriety checkpoints violated the Texas Constitution.
Senator Carona and his supporters say the new law will comply with the Supreme Courts requirement that they be “properly conducted” with guidelines that prevent their arbitrary use. The new Texas law does specifically prohibit profiling of the selected location by “ethnic or socioeconomic characteristics”.
Supporters of sobriety checkpoints say that there is overwhelming evidence of their effectiveness. The well known advocacy group, MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving has strongly supported sobriety check points. The Center for Injury Prevention and Control looked at 23 studies which they deemed to be scientifically sound from around the world and found that the incidence of alcohol related crashes was reduced by 20%.
Texas does rank as the number one state in alcohol-related crashes. Underage drinking is a significant problems with many killed each year under the age of 21. According to the President of the Texas Chapter of MADD, Laura Dean-Mooney just underage drinking and driving ends up costing the state $5.5 billion dollars. She says
“If we’re okay with that, then we shouldn’t be doing anything different in Texas, but we don’t think Texans are okay with that,”
About half of the fatalities (1,292 in 2007 according the National Transportation Safety Board) that occur in Texas motor vehicle accidents each year are due to alcohol. There has not been a significant reduction in this number of yearly deaths since 1997.
The libertarian CATO Institute has warned that advocacy of MADD has pushed hard into the protections of criminal defendants, family law, and has pushed themselves into being “neo-prohibitionists”. Radley Balko writing for CATO in 2005 quoted the founder of MADD, Candy Lightner, who recently complained
“[MADD has] become far more neo-prohibitionist than I had ever wanted or envisioned …,” Lightner is quoted as saying in an Aug. 6 [2005] story in the Washington Times. “I didn’t start MADD to deal with alcohol. I started MADD to deal with the issue of drunk driving,”
Some have warned that if the government can set up sobriety checkpoints what is to stop them from setting up weapons checkpoints, drug checkpoints, or other types of checkpoints. Those of us that live along the border have always felt that those Border Patrol roadblocks that lead happen on the highways out of the Rio Grande Valley were inappropriate.
This is why Senator Juan Hinojosa of (D-McAllen) voted against the sobriety checkpoints measure. He was quoted in the Austin Statesman by Janet Elliot saying
“You’re stopping and harassing people, innocent people who are not drunk and have not been drinking alcohol,” .
The new law appears to meet the Supreme Court’s guidelines and I expect it will pass. There is great chance that this will reduce the incidence of drunk driving and its deadly consequences. However, society will need to remain forever vigilant against abuses and unintended consequences of this new law enforcement tool.
I have mixed feelings about the law. Deaths and injury due to drinking and driving cost our society too many lives and dollars. On the other hand, the Constitution intended that government could not do blanket searches of individuals but instead had to rely upon an individual suspicion as noted by Justice Brennan. Every year cities are buying more and more surveillance cameras to watch public areas, there are special government programs that read our email and monitor our phone activity, and tax laws basically require that we report all our financial activities to the government. The right to privacy and the right to protection from unreasonable search are important components to American freedom. We must be always mindful to protect these rights in our quest to make to a better society.
Thanks for reading Contempo Magazine blog which discusses issues for McAllen, the Rio Grande Valley, and America from a conservative Hispanic point of view. Tony Magaña grew up in McAllen Texas, attended Texas A&M University, served as an officer in Army Reserve, and holds a doctorate from Harvard University. The co-founder of Contempo Magazine has participated in Valley business for over 20 years. He is a member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and also writes for the American Daily Review
