Supreme Court: DUI 'free swerve' stands

The court has always made some bad rulings but this one is stupid and foolish. The officer should follow a drunk until he hurts or kill someone to act? They have hotlines to report illegal activities and complain that they do not get public support and make a ruling like this, and wonder why.

Did Clarence Thomas sleep through this session too?

In just one hour, Sotomayor asked more questions than Thomas has in years:
http://thinkprogress.org/2009/10/06/sotomayor-thomas/
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More stupid crap from liberals. Next the police will be ask to not let the suspect fall getting out of the vehicle.

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However much one may think this was a stupid decision...it seems to me that one should not give away one's freedoms for the sake of security. There is a "thing" called, probable cause which is embedded somewhere in our Bill of Rights...like in the 4th Amendments.

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Posted by: John | October 20, 2009 4:29 PM
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The ruling (actually the non-ruling) is neither stupid nor bad. The Court merely let stand a Virginia case that said an anonymous tip can’t form the basis of a detention until police have information that shows the tip is reliable (e.g. corroborated). The ruling saves citizens from being needlessly stopped and harassed on the basis of crank calls or vindictive enemies. Until today, the Supreme Court has never recognized a ‘drunk driving’ exception to the Fourth Amendment - like the Courts in California and Illinois have. To the contrary, its case law has always required more than a phantom reason to justify a detention. In which case, refusing to review the Virginia case is perfectly in line with its prior decisions (including Florida v. J.L.)
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Also contrary to your suggestion, the Virginia ruling does nothing to pick the pocket or break the legs of the public. An officer doesn’t have to wait until a driver hurts or kills someone in order to make a car stop. He only has to observe behavior that is consistent with criminal activity, such as a driver’s impaired operation of a vehicle. It would be a strange case, indeed, where a person who was driving drunk didn’t exhibit his or her impairment by the way he/she drove a car. It would be even stranger for the police to pull someone over for drunk driving without observable manifestations of the driver’s impaired operation. Without observing impairment, the decision to detain a vehicle based on an anonymous tip seems to be rather unreasonable because the lack of expected visual corroboration would tend to undercut the reliability of the anonymous caller’s tip. One can expect, therefore, that the Virginia ruling will have little impact on the day-to-day operation of law enforcement.

More stupid crap from liberals. Next the police will be ask to not let the suspect fall getting out of the vehicle.
Posted by: Billw3 | October 20, 2009 5:27 PM
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
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So the Supreme Court is "liberal" now?

HaHaHaHaHaHaHaHa!!!
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Thanks for clarifying that JohnW!
And Jason your remark to Billw3 was brilliant!

Yeah Roberts, you still have to do something wrong in America before arrest and 'disappearing'. (Or maybe not?)
Sounds like the other justices stopped another activist decision from Roberts.

John W., I was surprised by this (non)ruling. I think one could argue that the SCOTUS has carved out an exception to the 4th Amendment for DUI cases in the 1990 Sitz case, where they upheld random checkpoints to stop drunk drivers. I agree that an anonymous call is a pretty flimsy justification to detain someone, but at least it is something. Checkpoints like in Sitz have no basis whatsoever to detain people, other than that they happen to be on the road at a given time. I think Sitz is bad law, and the SCOTUS should have used this opportunity to overturn it.

Good ruling IMO, the police should wait for corrobative evidence before pulling someone over on an anonymous tip. And the cops don't have to look very hard for an excuse - for example, all it takes is a wheel touching the dividing line for your lane (not even going over or recklessly swerving).

Roberto didn't study Newton.

Every swerve has an equal and opposite re-swerve.

Actually, I totally disagree with Roberts.

I guess I am Libertarian. An anonymous caller excuse gives police free reign to pull you over anytime without just cause. They can just say that they had an "anonymous" tip...who's to say? Can't prove it, can't disprove it.

I have had this happen out in the middle of nowhere, Mohave Desert, CA. Cop says "we got a call about people drinking it up". BS, he couldn't get me on radar because of the dips in the road, so he made up a story. Well, when he smelled my breath, he got a full blast of Nacho Doritos. ROTFL, take that!

So, if you are a cop and just decide that you want to pull someone over, maybe it's your favorite blond on the road, or someone that is "different" looking than you (racial, age, gender, or economic profiling) then you have absolute freedom to do so if you can say...ah, "I got a call".
America use your brain, please. Don't march in lockstep with a political party. BE FREE!

Sounds like the other justices stopped another activist decision from Roberts.

Posted by: C.Morris | October 20, 2009 9:00 PM

I love how liberal decisions are always considered 'Activist' by the wingnuts but any conservative decisions are considered 'Patriotic and right' regardless of constitutional reasoning or not.

Is this the same Supreme Court that ruled it is NOT identity theft if you do not personally know the individual from whom you are taking the information to base YOUR fake identity?

Roberts has a point, but I would agree with John W.l, that it won't effect law enforcement much. Cops often conduct road-side checks, looking for drunk drivers. This used to happen quite a bit near Antioch when Wisconsin still had 18 as the legal limit and lots of 19- and 20-year-old Illinois kids would go up that way. Palatine has/had random checks on Rand Rd.

Billw3 said:
"More stupid crap from liberals. Next the police will be ask to not let the suspect fall getting out of the vehicle."

Jason replied:
"So the Supreme Court is "liberal" now?"

I'd say the ruling was indeed liberal. Do you disagree?

Rogue cops pulling someone over without a tip is the exception to the rule. Preventing an accident outweighs this exception. I've driven over fifty years and never been pulled over without reason. You libs are all mixed up un this.

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Posted by: Herbie H. | October 20, 2009 9:54 PM
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Hi Herbie.
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In Michigan State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444 (1990), the Court didn’t carve out so much of a ‘drunk driving' exception to the Fourth Amendment as much as it created a 'misery-loves-company' exception. One of the main (but inexplicable) reasons the Court upheld the drunk-driving checkpoint was that every car on the road was stopped, and each of the drivers were asked but a few questions to determine their state of sobriety. Those who appeared sober were allowed to leave immediately. Balancing the ‘minimal’ intrusion of being stopped along with all other drivers, the brief encounter with uniformed police, and the states’ interest in ridding their highways of drunk drivers, the Court found the checkpoint ‘reasonable.’
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I agree with you that Sitz was a bad case and should be overturned. I think it is nothing short of paradoxical that mass detentions require less justification than individual ones. However, the Virginia case was probably not the right case to re-examine Sitz because it did not involve a checkpoint. The police stopped only the one vehicle solely on the basis of an anonymous call. The law required them to know of reasonably reliable facts supporting a suspicion of criminal activity, and anonymous tips rarely fit this criteria. What this (non-)ruling does is deepen the gulf between states in which the courts allow drunk driving detentions on the flimsy basis of anonymous tips and those that do not. A split among authorities can eventually become a good reason for the Court to settle constitutional issues.

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Posted by: Billw3 | October 21, 2009 1:12 PM
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I disagree that it was a particularly ‘liberal’ decision. Compliance with the Constitution is neither liberal nor conservative. It is required regardless of one's political point of view (and there are many politicians on both sides of the aisle that need to learn this).
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The holding in the case from Virginia was not a departure from U.S. Supreme Court precedent. In the case of Florida v. J.L., 529 U.S. 266 (2000) the U.S. Supreme Court held unanimously that an anonymous tip could not justify the detention of a young black man whom the anonymous caller claimed to be in possession of a concealed firearm. The decision was supported by conservative Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, O’Connor, Kennedy and Thomas. If none of the conservative justices were persuaded that a bare anonymous tip is good enough to detain for a concealed firearm, then one must ask: Why should a different rule apply to a drunk-driving case?
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There doesn’t appear to be any good reason for a different rule. A drunk driver can be spotted more easily than a concealed weapon. And, apparently, most of the conservative justices didn’t think there as a good reason either. Three of the five conservative justices on the Court (including Alito, Thomas and Kennedy) voted along with the more "liberal" side of the court not to hear the case from the Virginia Supreme Court. (Indeed, consider the fact the case was decided by the Virginia Supreme Court, which is not known for handing down liberal decisions in criminal cases.) Only Roberts and Scalia felt it worthwhile to whine about drunk-driving cases. They were in the minority even among conservatives on the Court.
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Consider also that the Supreme Court denied certiorari. A denial of certiorari only leaves a lower decision alone, and it is not an expression of approval for a lower court’s decision. Besides, the Virginia case has little precedential value outside of Virginia. A decision rendered by a state court is not binding authority on any other state or federal court. Its value outside of Virginia is what we call “persuasive authority” - which means that another court might adopt the same rule if it likes the reasoning, but is not bound by law to do so. So, as I said before, the case from Virginia is likely to have little effect on law enforcement, and particularly outside of Virginia.
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Given all of the above, this case doesn’t smell, feel or sound like a ‘liberal’ case to me.

In the year 2000 there where 20 thousand fatal automobile accidents in total. Today we have bloated statistic saying 12,000 Americans die every year in alcohol-related crashes.

So with seat belt laws, airbags and larger SUV and trucks,& Huge DWI arrests MORE PEOPLE ARE BEING KILLED IN CAR ACCIDENTS DUE TO alcohol? I call BS!

MADD is a communist organization that enjoys the capitalist side of life!

These old lying whores are responsible for the destruction of the United States of America.