Court Opinion

ID: 9819062
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 06:18:11.694787+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:41:47.324714
License: Public Domain

CHIEF JUSTICE HARRISON, specially concurring: I agree with the result reached by my colleagues. I write separately because I do not share the majority’s view regarding the purpose of the warnings required by the implied-consent statute. My colleagues advance the notion that the warnings have nothing to do with enabling detained motorists to make an informed choice about submitting to police testing, but are instead part of a scheme to help the State extract incriminating evidence of intoxication. In other words, they construe the warnings not as a normal admonition of the sort typically given to criminal defendants, but as a threat, a form of coercion: “let us take your blood or else.” I see things differently. In my view, the warnings required by the implied-consent statute must be understood as part of the legacy of Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 16 L. Ed. 2d 694, 86 S. Ct. 1602 (1966), and its recognition of the need for safeguards to secure the privilege against self-incrimination. Miranda is the paradigm through which all admonitions from the police are now viewed by our citizenry. In the wake of Miranda, people understand that they have choices about what they say and do when detained by the police and they understand that the police must put them on notice of those choices. Legislators and judges must therefore assume that when motorists receive warnings from the police of the type required by the implied-consent statute, they will interpret those warnings as affording them meaningful protection and meaningful options. That the statutory warnings in the implied-consent law were intended to enable motorists to make informed decisions regarding whether they should assent to testing by the police is something that our appellate court has consistently recognized. See People v. Estrada, 313 Ill. App. 3d 245, 248 (2000); People v. Diestelhorst, 253 Ill. App. 3d 867, 870 (1993); People v. Engelbrecht, 225 Ill. App. 3d 550, 555 (1992); People v. Znaniecki, 181 Ill. App. 3d 389, 392 (1989). The adequacy of the warnings, however, does depend on whether the particular defendant involved in the case actually understood them. As long as the defendant can comprehend that he is being asked to take a test (see People v. Wegielnik, 152 Ill. 2d 418, 432 (1992)) and as long as the pretest warnings are objectively accurate and informative (see Englebrecht, 225 Ill. App. 3d at 557), the warnings will suffice. The inquiry is an objective one. The defendant’s actual state of mind is not a relevant consideration. The situation must be assessed, instead, from the point of view of a reasonable motorist, conversant in English, and confronting the same circumstances faced by the defendant in the case before the court. If such a motorist would adequately understand the options available to him and the consequences of those actions, the actual defendant in the case cannot complain that the warnings were deficient because he, personally, did not understand them, n Similarly, the actual defendant in the case cannot assail the warnings because they were defective in some way that had no bearing on the facts before the court. The inaccuracies must have been such that they would have misled a reasonable person regarding his options or the consequences of those options under the circumstances presented by the case. In other words, the inaccuracies, viewed objectively, must have been prejudicial. See 316 Ill. App. 3d at 52 (Thomas, J., dissenting). The inaccuracies here were not prejudicial. They would not have affected the decisionmaking of a reasonable person facing the circumstances confronted by defendant because they had nothing whatever to do with defendant’s situation. As the majority correctly notes, the problem cited by the defendant concerned motorists who were not first offenders. Defendant, himself, however was a first-time offender. That part of the warning was therefore irrelevant. Accordingly, I agree that recission of defendant’s suspension was not warranted, that the judgments of the appellate and circuit courts should be reversed and that the matter should be remanded to the circuit court for further proceedings.