Court Opinion

ID: 9703728
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 00:06:07.312285+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:21:51.456114
License: Public Domain

*357NIGRO, Justice, dissenting.
While I strongly agree with the majority that the Commonwealth has a clear and compelling interest in promoting highway safety and keeping drunk drivers off the road,1 I must respectfully dissent because I cannot agree with the majority’s conclusion that systematic DUI roadblocks are a necessary tool of law enforcement and deterrence. While there can be no doubt that drunk driving presents a grave danger and threatens the safety of all drivers, passengers, and pedestrians, there are, in my view, more efficient and less intrusive ways to address the scourge of drunk driving. I am confident that the Commonwealth’s trained law enforcement officers can spot violators and validly arrest drunk drivers without having to stop all traffic and unjustifiably intrude on the lives of law-abiding drivers.
Unlike the majority, I believe DUI roadblocks are a waste of limited resources and promote inefficient law enforcement because police officers are forced to spend innumerable hours stopping hundreds of vehicles for a comparatively low number of DUI arrests. It defies common sense to argue that by consolidating police resources on one section of one street, the police can catch more drunk drivers. This logic somehow presumes that drunk drivers will voluntarily line up at predetermined checkpoints. The more realistic presumption, however, is that an unknown number of drunk drivers who would have easily attracted the attention of trained law officers on routine patrol evade detection simply by using roads other than those targeted for DUI roadblocks. See Jon M. Ripans, Comment, Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz: Sober Reflections on How the Supreme Court has Blurred the Law of Suspicionless Seizures, 25 Ga.L.Rev. 199, 215 (1990) (DUI roadblocks may in fact increase drunk driving fatalities because drunk drivers may use poorly lit back roads to avoid pre-determined and announced roadblocks).
*358Simply looking at the facts of the instant case confirms the irrationality of using DUI checkpoints. Only three DUI arrests were made from the three hundred vehicles stopped at the roadblock over a three-hour period. N.T, 3/13/98, at 48-49. Unfortunately, this inefficiency is not an isolated example. See e.g. Ascher v. Commissioner of Public Safety, 519 N.W.2d 183, 184, 187 (Minn.1994) (state did not articulate persuasive reason for disregarding the standard requirement of individualized suspicion when only 1.4% of vehicle stops at roadblock resulted in DUI arrests); Nadine Strossen, Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz: A Roadblock to Meaningful Judicial Enforcement of Constitutional Rights, 42 Hastings L.J. 285, 287 (1991) (data from both the Michigan roadblock in Sitz and other jurisdictions consistently reveal that fewer than 1% of drivers passing through such roadblocks are arrested for DUI). In my view, the argument that DUI roadblocks promote efficient law enforcement pays specious lip service to the problems of drunk driving.2 See Pimental v. Department of Transp., 561 A.2d 1348, 1352 (R.I.1989) (not logical to allow police “to stop fifty or a hundred vehicles on the speculative chance that one or two may be” drunk drivers). While the high visibility of DUI roadblocks may be a public relations success for the police, the roadblocks do little to protect the public from the problem of drunk drivers.3 See Sitz v. Department of State Police, 193 MicLApp. 690, 485 N.W.2d 135, 137 n. 2 (1992), aff'd, 443 Mich. 744, 506 N.W.2d 209 (1993)(the majority of law enforcement involved in implementing DUI *359roadblocks do not believe that roadblocks are an effective method of addressing the problem of drunk driving).
Contrary to the majority, I do not believe that DUI roadblocks act as a deterrent to drunk driving. In my view, to effectively deter drunk drivers, the obvious remedy is to catch more drunk drivers by utilizing routine police patrols and roving DUI patrols, rather than using one pre-determined and pre-announced location. See State v. Henderson, 114 Idaho 293, 756 P.2d 1057, 1061 (1988) (DUI roadblocks held invalid due in part to testimony of police officers that more drunk drivers would be caught by routine patrols than by the use of roadblocks, while using the same amount of police resources; a well-publicized program of roving patrols is the best deterrent to drunk drivers); State v. Koppel, 127 N.H. 286, 499 A.2d 977 (1985) (1,680 vehicles stopped at 47 roadblocks resulted in only 18 DUI arrests, while during the same time period 175 arrests were made by traditional methods of roving patrols); Nadine Strossen, Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz: A Roadblock to Meaningful Judicial Enforcement of Constitutional Rights, 42 Hastings L.J. 285, 287 (1991) (noting that law enforcement personnel and other experts concluded sobriety checkpoints are less effective in detecting and deterring drunk driving than roving patrols). Rather than effectively deterring drunk driving, DUI roadblocks merely squander the limited resources available to law enforcement.
By extending Commonwealth v. Blouse, 531 Pa. 167, 611 A.2d 1177 (1992), to DUI roadblocks, the majority concludes that the Commonwealth’s interest in catching and deterring drunk drivers outweighs the minimal intrusion imposed on drivers subjected to DUI roadblocks. In my opinion, however, the majority improperly restricts its focus to the privacy invasion of each individual motorist as he or she physically passes through a single checkpoint. The majority stresses that the motorists in the instant case were only stopped for an average of thirty seconds. The majority then balances the “minimal intrusion” of a thirty-second stop against the Com*360monwealth’s cumulative interest in catching and deterring drunk drivers.4 A fairer balance would weigh the actual expected alleviation of the problem of drunk driving against the cumulative intrusion into the privacy interests of all motorists. See City of Seattle v. Mesiani, 110 Wash.2d 454, 755 P.2d 775, 778 (1988)(the most common fallacy in “balancing” is to compare the entire cumulative interest of the state’s policy with one individual’s interest in freedom from the specific intrusion).
In my view, the majority underestimates the intrusion that DUI roadblocks pose to the cumulative interests of all motorists in the Commonwealth. DUI roadblocks involve more than the mere inconvenience of being stopped for a short period of time. The majority fails to account for the time that innocent and law-abiding citizens spend stuck in the backlog of traffic waiting to pass through a roadblock.5 Furthermore, the same individuals can be repeatedly subjected to the same intrusions time and time again, further increasing the intrusion into the privacy interests of law-abiding motorists.
When the cumulative interests of all motorists is weighed against the Commonwealth’s interest in keeping drunk drivers off the roads, it becomes clear that DUI roadblocks are not the least intrusive means of addressing the scourge of drunk driving. Instead, in my view, utilizing roving patrols by trained police officers is a much more effective way of catching and deterring drunk drivers. Since I cannot condone the use of relatively ineffective suspicionless DUI roadblocks, which I *361believe also improperly intrude on the lives of law-abiding citizens, I must respectfully dissent.
Justice ZAPPALA joins in the dissenting opinion.

. See 4 Wayne R. LaFave, Search & Seizure § 10.8(d) (3d ed.1996) (“there is no denying the fact that there is a very strong societal interest in dealing effectively with the problem of drunken driving”).

. In addition, the administrative requirements of DUI roadblocks expound police inefficiency. The time spent deciding where to place roadblocks would be better spent patrolling the roads catching actual drunk drivers, rather than speculating where a few drunk drivers, out of hundreds of cars stopped, may be caught.

. “[SJobriety checkpoints are elaborate, and disquieting, publicity stunts.” Michigan Dep't of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U.S. 444, 475, 110 S.Ct. 2481, 110 L.Ed.2d 412 (1990) (Stevens, J., dissenting). In Sitz, Justice Stevens noted that over a period of several years, the state of Maryland conducted 125 DUI checkpoints and that of the 41,000 motorists passing through those checkpoints, only 143 persons (0.3%) were arrested. Id. at 461, 110 S.Ct. 2481. He compared this figure to the 71,000 DUI arrests made without DUI checkpoints in Michigan in one year alone. Id. at 462, 110 S.Ct. 2481.

. Clearly the Commonwealth not only has a weighty interest in eradicating drunk driving, but also in detecting and deterring all crime. Under the majority’s analysis, however, a further extension of Blouse may improperly result in similar roadblocks being used to stop and question all motorists regarding other crimes, such as possession of narcotics or possession of stolen property. See State v. DeBooy, 996 P.2d 546, 551 (Utah 2000) (holding unconstitutional a DUI checkpoint that was "less a highway safety measure, and more a pretext to stop all vehicles to search for any and all violations of the law”).

. This is particularly true given that DUI roadblocks are typically set up pursuant to administrative procedures that predict heavily traveled roads likely to be used by drunk drivers.