Court Opinion

ID: 9427653
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:21:31.014303+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:08.849685
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Stewart,
with whom Mr. Justice Brennan, Mr. Justice Marshall, and Mr. Justice Stevens join, dissenting.
The question in this case, simply put, is whether a person who is subject to losing his driver’s license for three months as a penalty for allegedly refusing a demand to take a breath-analysis test is constitutionally entitled to some sort of hearing before his license is taken away. In Massachusetts, such suspensions are effected by the Registrar of Motor Vehicles solely upon the strength of a policeman’s affidavit recounting his version of an encounter between the police and the motorist. Mass. Gen. Laws Ann., ch. 90, §24 (1) (f) (West Supp. 1979). The driver is afforded no opportunity, before this deprivation occurs, to present his side of the story in a forum *20other than a police station. He is given no notice of any entitlement he might have to a “same day” hearing before the Registrar. The suspension penalty itself is concededly imposed not as an emergency measure to remove unsafe drivers from the roads, but as a sanction to induce drivers to submit to breath-analysis tests. In short, the critical fact that triggers the suspension is noncooperation with the police, not drunken driving. In my view, the most elemental principles of due process forbid a State from extracting this penalty without first affording the driver an opportunity to be heard.
A
Our decisions in Bell v. Burson, 402 U. S. 535, and Dixon v. Love, 431 U. S. 105, made clear that a person’s interest in his driver’s license is “property” that a State may not take away without satisfying the requirements of the due process guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. And the constitutional guarantee of procedural due process has always been understood to embody a presumptive requirement of notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before the State acts finally to deprive a person of his property. Mullane v. Central Hanover Trust Co., 339 U. S. 306, 313; Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U. S. 67, 82; Boddie v. Connecticut, 401 U. S. 371, 378; Bell v. Burson, supra, at 542; Memphis Light, Gas Water Div. v. Craft, 436 U. S. 1, 16, 19.
This settled principle serves to ensure that the person threatened with loss has an opportunity to present his side of the story to a neutral decisionmaker “at a time when the deprivation can still be prevented.” Fuentes v. Shevin, supra, at 81-82. It protects not simply against the risk of an erroneous decision. It also protects a “vulnerable citizenry from the overbearing concern for efficiency . . . that may characterize praiseworthy government officials no less . . . than mediocre ones.” Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S. 645, 656. Cf. Memphis Light, Gas & Water Div. v. Craft, supra, at 21 n. 28. The very act of dealing with what purports to be *21an “individual case” without first affording the person involved the protection of a hearing offends the concept of basic fairness that underlies the constitutional due process guarantee.
When a deprivation is irreversible — as is the case with a license suspension that can at best be shortened but cannot be undone — the requirement of some kind of hearing before a final deprivation takes effect is all the more important. Thus, in Bell v. Burson, the Court deemed it fundamental that “except in emergency situations” the State must afford a prior hearing before a driver’s license termination becomes effective. 402 U. S., at 542.1 In Bell, the State did provide a presus-pension administrative hearing, but the Court held that the State could not, while purporting to condition a suspension in part on fault, exclude the element of fault from consideration in that hearing. The dimensions of a prior hearing may, of course, vary depending upon the nature of the case, the interests affected, and the prompt availability of adequate postdeprivation procedures. Boddie v. Connecticut, supra; Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, 334-335. But when adjudicative facts are involved, when no valid governmental interest would demonstrably be disserved by delay, and when full retroactive relief cannot be provided, an after-the-fact *22evidentiary hearing on a critical issue is not constitutionally sufficient. Compare Mathews v. Eldridge, supra, with Bell v. Burson, supra.
The case of Dixon v. Love, 431 U. S. 105, is not, as the Court seems to suggest, to the contrary. At issue in Love was a statute permitting the summary revocation of the license of a repeat traffic offender on the strength of a cumulative record of traffic convictions and suspensions. The Court in Love stressed that the appellee had not contested the factual basis for his license revocation and had not contested the procedures followed in securing his previous convictions. Instead, the Love appellee had merely asserted a right to appear in person in advance to ask for leniency. Id., at 114. Under these circumstances, the Court held that summary suspension was permissible, for the “appellee had the opportunity for a full judicial hearing in connection with each of the traffic convictions on which the . . . decision was based.” Id., at 113 (emphasis added). Love, then, involved an instance in which a revocation followed virtually automatically from the fact of duly obtained convictions for a stated number of traffic offenses. It established no broad exception to the normal presumption in favor of a prior hearing. See Memphis Light, Gas & Water Div. v. Craft, supra, at 19 n. 24.
B
The Court likens this driver’s license suspension to the revocation at issue in Love, but in my view that analogy simply cannot be drawn. The Massachusetts breath-analysis suspension statute, in clear contrast to the Love statute, affords the driver no prior hearing of any kind to contest the critical factual allegations upon which the suspension is based. Those allegations can hardly be equated with routinely kept records of serious traffic offense convictions.
A breath-analysis suspension is premised upon three factors: *23reasonable grounds for an arrest for driving while intoxicated; a proper request by the officer that the driver submit to a breath-analysis test; and a refusal to do so by the driver. Mass. Gen. Laws Ann., ch. 90, § 24 (1) (f) (West Supp. 1979). The appellee in this case was indeed arrested, after a collision in which his car was struck in the rear by a motorcycle, for driving while intoxicated. Moreover, he admitted that he initially refused to take a breath-analysis test. But he consistently contended that he was not informed of the sanction, as is required by § 24 (1) (f), and he vigorously disputed the accuracy of the police affidavit that said he was so informed. His further claim — that he requested a test as soon as he learned by inadvertence of the sanction, and that the police then refused to administer the test — was apparently accepted by the Massachusetts judge who subsequently dismissed the drunken-driving charge against him. Thus, there was clearly a significant factual dispute in this case.
That dispute, as in Bell v. Burson, concerned a critical element of the statutory basis for a suspension — in this instance whether there was indeed a refusal to take a breath-analysis test after a proper demand. The Court suggests nonetheless that the “fact” of an informed refusal, as well as the other statutory factual bases for a suspension, is somehow so routine, objective, and reliable as to be equivalent to routinely maintained official records of criminal convictions. I find this equation highly dubious. Initial deprivations of liberty based upon ex parte probable-cause determinations by the police are, of course, not unusual, Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U. S. 103; ex parte probable-cause determinations by neutral magistrates relying upon properly corroborated police affidavits to determine whether arrest or search warrants should issue are likewise commonly made. E. g., Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U. S. 108. But these practices, to the extent that they permit ex parte deprivations of liberty or property, are clearly necessitated by the exigencies of law enforcement. They supply no support *24for the proposition that a police affidavit can provide a constitutionally sufficient basis for the deprivation of property in a civil proceeding, when there is ample time to give the owner an opportunity to be heard in an impartial forum before an impartial decisionmaker.
Moreover, there is a vast difference between the record of duly adjudicated convictions at issue in Love and the historical facts of the encounter between the police and a motorist that form the basis for the driver’s license suspension in the present case. To be sure, these relatively uncomplicated facts are unquestionably within “the ^personal knowledge of the reporting officer.” Ante, at 14. But they are also within the knowledge of the driver. This Court (has yet to hold that the police version of a disputed encounter between the police and a private citizen is inevitably accurate and reliable.2
1 am not persuaded that the relative infrequency with which a driver may be able successfully to show that he did not refuse to take a breath-analysis test should excuse the State from the constitutional need to afford a prior hearing to any person who wishes to make such a challenge. The question whether or not there was such a refusal is one classically subject to adjudicative factfinding, and one that plainly involves issues of credibility and veracity. Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S., at 343-344. The driver’s “opportunity to tell his side of the story” to “the arresting officer,” ante, at 14, surely *25cannot seriously be deemed a “meaningful opportunity to be heard” in the due process sense. There is simply no escaping the fact that the first hearing Massachusetts supplies on a breath-analysis suspension comes after the license of the driver has been taken away. And it is clear that the suspension itself effects a final deprivation of property that no subsequent proceeding can restore. Cf. Mathews v. Eldridge, supra, at 340.3
The State has urged, and the Court seems to agree, ante, at 17-19, that summary procedures are nevertheless required to further the State's interest in protecting the public from unsafe drivers. It cannot be doubted that the interest in “removing drunken drivers from the road” is significant. But the precedents súpporting ex parte action have not turned simply on the significance of the governmental interest asserted. To the contrary, they have relied upon the extent to which that interest will be frustrated by the delay necessitated by a prior hearing. E. g., North American Storage Co. v. Chicago, 211 U. S. 306 (allegedly spoiled food), and cases *26cited in n. 1, supra. The breath-analysis test is plainly not designed to remove an irresponsible driver from the road as swiftly as possible. For if a motorist submits to the test and fails it, he keeps his driver’s license — a result wholly at odds with any notion that summary suspension upon refusal to take the test serves an emergency protective purpose. A suspension for refusal to take the test is obviously premised not on intoxication, but on noncooperation with the police.
The State’s basic justification for its summary suspension scheme, as the Court recognizes, ante, at 18, lies in the unremarkable idea that a prior hearing might give drivers a significant incentive to refuse to take the test, delated to this argument is the suggestion that the availability of a prior hearing might encourage a driver to demand such a hearing as a “dilatory” tactic, and thus might increase administrative costs by generating a “sharp increase in the number of hearings.” Ibid. In sum, the State defends the ex parte suspension as essential to enlist the cooperation of drivers and also as a cost-saving device. I cannot accept either argument.
The 3-month driver’s license suspension alone is obviously sufficient to promote the widespread use of the breath-analysis test, if drivers are informed not only of this sanction for a refusal but also realize that cooperation may conclude the entire case in their favor. Moreover, as is generally the case when a person’s ability to protect his interests will ultimately depend upon a swearing contest with a law enforcement officer, the deck is already stacked heavily against the motorist under this statute. This point will not be lost upon the motorist. The State’s position boils down to the thesis that the failure to afford an opportunity for a prior hearing can itself be part of the stacked deck. But there is no room for this type of argument in our constitutional system. A State is simply not free to manipulate Fourteenth Amendment procedural rights to coerce a person into compliance with its substantive rules, however important it may *27consider those rules to be. The argument that a prior hearing might encourage “dilatory” tactics on the part of the motorist, true as it might be to human nature, is likewise wholly inconsistent with the simple Fourteenth Amendment guarantee that every “person” is entitled to be heard, before he may be deprived of his property by the State. Finally, the all too familiar cost-saving arguments raised by the State have regularly been made here and have as regularly been rejected as a justification for dispensing with the guarantees of the Fourteenth Amendment. For if costs were the criterion, the basic procedural protections of the Fourteenth Amendment could be read out of the Constitution. Happily, the Constitution recognizes higher values than “speed and efficiency.” Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S., at 656.
C
The Court’s holding that the Massachusetts breath-analysis suspension scheme satisfies the Constitution seems to be premised in large part on the assumption that a prompt post-suspension hearing is available. But even assuming that such an after-the-fact procedure would be constitutionally sufficient in this situation, the so-called “prompt postsuspension” remedy afforded by Massachusetts is, so far as I can tell, largely fictional. First, the State does not notify the driver of the availability of any such remedy.4 And without notice, the remedy, even if it exists, is hardly a meaningful safeguard. Only last Term we reaffirmed that “reasonable” notice of a *28procedural right is itself integral to due process. Memphis Light, Gas & Water Div. v. Craft, 436 U. S., at 13-15. This inherent principle has long been established, see Mullane v. Central Hanover Trust Co., 339 U. S., at 314, and Massachusetts clearly has not honored it.
Quite apart from the failure of Massachusetts to inform the driver of any entitlement to a “walk-in” hearing, that remedy cannot — as the Court recognizes — provide immediate relief to the driver who contests the police report of his refusal to take a test. To resolve such a factual dispute, a “meaningful hearing” before an impartial decisionmaker would require the presence of the officer who filed the report, the attesting officer, and any witnesses the driver might wish to call. But the State has provided no mechanism for scheduling any such immediate postsuspension evidentiary hearing.5 The fact is that the “walk-in” procedure provides little more than a right to request the scheduling of a later hearing. In the meantime, the license suspension continues, for the Registrar is without statutory power to stay a suspension founded upon a technically correct affidavit pending the outcome of an evidentiary hearing.
Finally, the Registrar — according to the Court’s own description of the Massachusetts scheme — quite possibly does not have authority to resolve even the most basic questions that might be raised about the validity of a breath-analysis suspension. Ante, at 15 n. 8. And, if the Registrar has no final authority to resolve the “legal” question the Court perceives in this case,6 it can hardly be concluded that there *29exists the prompt postsuspension relief that is said to excuse the State from any need to provide a prior hearing. For, if a prompt postsuspension hearing is even to be eligible for consideration as minimally adequate to satisfy the demands of procedural due process, it must provide for an impartial decisionmaker with authority to resolve the basic dispute and to provide prompt relief. See Memphis Light, Gas & Water Div. v. Craft, supra, at 18.7
*30D
The Court has never subscribed to the general view “that a wrong may be done if it can be undone,” Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U. S., at 647. We should, in my opinion, be even less enchanted by the proposition that due process is satisfied by delay when the wrong cannot be undone at all, but at most can be limited in duration. Even a day’s loss of a driver’s license can inflict grave injury upon a person who depends upon an automobile for continued employment in his job.
I do not mean to minimize the importance of breath-analysis testing as part of a state effort to identify, prosecute, and rehabilitate the alcohol-ridden motorist. I cannot, however, agree that the summary suspension of a driver’s license authorized by this Massachusetts law is a constitutionally permissible method to further those objectives. For, on the sole basis of a policeman’s affidavit, the license is summarily suspended, and it is suspended not for drunken driving but only for failure to cooperate with the police. The State — in my view — has totally failed to demonstrate that this summary suspension falls within any recognized exception to the established protections of the Fourteenth Amendment. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

 Emergency situations have generally been defined as those in which swift action is necessary to protect public health, safety, revenue or the integrity of public institutions. See, e. g., Central Union Trust Co. v. Garvan, 254 U. S. 554 (emergency action during wartime); Ewing v. Mytinger & Casselberry, Inc., 339 U. S. 594 (seizure of misbranded drugs); North American Storage Co. v. Chicago, 211 U. S. 306 (seizure of allegedly diseased poultry); Phillips v. Commissioner, 283 U. S. 589 (effective tax collection); Fahey v. Mallonee, 332 U. S. 245 (emergency bank management) ; cf. Goss v. Lopez, 419 U. S. 565, 582 (to protect a public institution from a continuing danger). See generally J. Freedman, Crisis and Legitimacy: The Administrative Process and American Government (1978); L. Tribe, American Constitutional Law §10-14 (1978).

 Contrary to the Court’s suggestion, the case of Mathews v. Eldridge, 424 U. S. 319, provides no precedential support for the ex parte suspension procedure followed by Massachusetts. The disability-benefit termination procedures upheld in Mathews did not involve an “ex parte” deprivation of property. To the contrary, the Court in Mathews stressed that the recipient had been afforded an opportunity to make extensive written submissions to the decisionmaker before any initial termination decision was made. Id., at 344, 345. Given the amenability of the critical issue to written presentation and the clear availability of a prompt post-termination evidentiary hearing, this prior opportunity to be heard— albeit in writing — was deemed constitutionally sufficient.

 The Court stresses that a presuspension evidentiary hearing would be futile since the Registrar has no discretion to stay a suspension pending that hearing. The Court also emphasizes that the decision not to give the Registrar such discretion reflects a “rational” legislative choice. Ante, at 16-17. I fail to see how these observations answer the procedural due process claim in this case. The choice that the Massachusetts Legislature has made is merely a part of its decision to dispense with a presuspension hearing that is here under constitutional challenge. "To be sure, that choice might well be “rational” in the equal protection sense. But the “rationality” of a legislative decision to dispense with the procedural safeguards that constitutionally must precede state deprivation of a person’s interest has never been deemed controlling. The Court may, of course, be suggesting that the legislature has established a presumption that a driver who refuses a breath-analysis test is per se an unsafe driver. But the State has not made this argument, and indeed it would be a strange one in the context of this statute. For the state law expressly provides that an alleged refusal to take a breath-analysis test is not admissible as evidence in a prosecution for driving while intoxicated. Mass. Gen. Laws Ann., ch. 90, § 24 (1) (e) (West Supp. 1979).

 To be sure, the statute states that a driver is entitled to a limited hearing before the Registrar, see Mass. Gen. Laws Ann., ch. 90, §24(l)(g) (West 1969), and the parties have stipulated that under Massachusetts practice the driver may schedule this hearing by “walking in” to a Registry Office. The only postdeprivation remedy mentioned in the suspension notice sent to the driver, however, is a right to take “an appeal” within 10 days to the Board of Appeal on Motor Vehicle Liability. The unexplained reason for the appellee’s failure to exercise his right to the putative “walk-in” hearing, ante, at 7-8, thus may lie in the failure of the State to notify him of any such right.

 An obvious mechanism is suggested by the procedures generally followed for routine traffic offenses. The driver is immediately notified by summons of his right to request a judicial hearing. If a request is made, a date is set, the driver and the police are notified, and the question of liability is then resolved in a single proceeding.

 The legal question identified by the Court is whether a delayed offer to cooperate on the driver’s part should excuse the suspension penalty. In this case, that question presumably would not arise if the delay had in fact *29been attributable to the failure on the part of the police to comply with the statutory requirement that the driver be informed of the sanction. If, as the appellee has claimed, this is what happened, the question would be whether a refusal after an improper demand is legally sufficient to justify a suspension.

 Indeed, under the Court’s description of the postsuspension relief available under the statute, it appears that the appellee was by no means “assured a prompt proceeding and a prompt disposition of the outstanding issues between [him] and the State.” Barry v. Barchi, post, at 66 (emphasis added). This precise constitutional infirmity has led the Court in Barry v. Barchi to sustain the Fourteenth Amendment claim of a horse trainer whose trainer’s racing license was summarily suspended upon a probable-cause showing that his horse was drugged before a race. Here, as in Barchi, the appellee was not notified of any right to prompt postsuspension relief. Here, as in Barchi, the hearing available upon “appeal” from the administrative summary suspension, see Mass. Gen. Laws Ann., ch. 90, §28 (West 1969), appears to be the only meaningful postsuspension evidentiary hearing afforded. As in Barchi, the statute involved here does not specify when this review must begin, does not require that the suspension be stayed during review, and does not require the Board of Appeal to reach a prompt decision. Further, in view of the Registrar’s apparent lack of authority to make any definitive determination of the issues in any evidentiary hearing that the driver might schedule by “walking in,” there seems to be no “assurance” under this statute that the driver will receive prompt postsuspension relief from a “trial level” hearing examiner. In sum, under the principle established in Barchi, the District Court upon remand for consideration of this appel-lee’s “as applied” challenge to his suspension, ante, at 10 n. 6, will be required to sustain that challenge, unless the courts find that the appellee was in fact given advance notice of his right to an immediate postsuspension hearing and was “assured” under the statute of an immediate and definitive resolution of the contested issues in his case.