Court Opinion

ID: 9576750
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 21:28:06.526874+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:15:20.139405
License: Public Domain

Sears, Justice,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
If the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution means anything at all it means that field officers have no business arbitrarily and indiscriminately stopping people from traversing our public roads. The Fourth Amendment’s concerns — to protect citizens from arbitrary and unreasonable intrusions by the State — can easily be satisfied by requiring that roadblocks be established only with systematic supervisory control. Without such extensive control, people will not be free to travel public roads without the fear and nuisance of encountering arbitrary and indiscriminate roadblocks. It is for this reason that I concur in Divisions 1, 2, and 4 of the majority opinion, but dissent to Division'3 and to the judgment.
LaFontaine’s first enumeration raises the issue of the constitutionality of roadblocks established for the purpose of checking driver’s licenses, vehicle registrations, and other motor vehicle violations.
Trooper Jackson of the Georgia State Patrol testified that at 10:00 a.m. on the morning of October 22, 1996, he was conducting a roadblock on Old Atlanta Road in order to detect “any violation of Georgia law, whatsoever,” including violations of laws governing driver’s licenses and mandatory insurance requirements. He added that he and his fellow officer stopped every car that approached the roadblock, and that that procedure was standard policy. The only evidence that supervisory personnel had any role in the roadblock in question was Trooper Jackson’s testimony that a supervising officer had issued standing orders for field officers to conduct roadblocks, weather permitting. Trooper Jackson, however, testified that the field officers had complete discretion concerning where to locate the roadblock. The record thus demonstrates that the field officers had the discretion to control the time, the place, and the duration of the roadblock, and that the only limitation on their discretion was that they had to stop each vehicle.
*255In determining whether a roadblock violates the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, it is beyond dispute that “a Fourth Amendment ‘seizure’ occurs when a vehicle is stopped at a checkpoint.”1 The question then becomes whether the seizure was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. This question is answered by balancing the State’s interest, the effectiveness of the roadblock in advancing that interest, and the level of intrusion upon the individual driver’s privacy.2
As for the first factor, I conclude that it is clearly satisfied in this case, as courts have uniformly and properly recognized that states have a significant interest in enforcing their motor vehicle laws regarding licensing, insurance, and registration.3
Further, as for the second factor of whether the roadblock advanced the public interest, the record is silent about the number of violations discovered during the roadblock in question. In Sitz, the Supreme Court concluded that the effectiveness prong of the balancing test was satisfied by empirical evidence that about 1.6 percent of drivers stopped were arrested for alcohol impairment.4 The Court, however, did not hold that empirical evidence is required to demonstrate that roadblocks reasonably advance the state’s interests, and other courts have refused to require such empirical evidence.5 It is unnecessary in this appeal to resolve whether empirical evidence is required because I conclude that the third factor — the intrusion on individual liberty — tips the balancing test against the State.
Under the third prong of the balancing test, courts consider such factors as the duration of the stop, the intensity of the investigation, the fear and surprise in law-abiding motorists that may be raised by the stop, and the extent to which the roadblock is left to the discretion of field officers.6 The latter factor is determinative in the present case. As for that factor, many courts have agreed that for roadblocks to be constitutionally reasonable, it is imperative that they be established by supervisory personnel in order to avoid the arbitrariness that is possible if the time, location, manner, and duration of the *256stops are left to the discretion of officers in the field.7 As the Supreme Court of Virginia stated in Simmons:
To avoid constitutionally impermissible infringements on privacy, the roadblock must be carried out pursuant to a plan or practice which is explicit, contains neutral criteria, and limits the conduct of the officers undertaking the roadblock. Such a plan serves to insure that one’s “reasonable expectation of privacy is not subject to arbitrary invasions solely at the unfettered discretion of officers in the field.”8
The Court in Simmons rejected the contention that all that was necessary to make a roadblock constitutionally reasonable was for the police officers conducting the stop to stop every vehicle subject to the roadblock. The Court held, instead, that the roadblock had to be “undertaken pursuant to a specific plan or practice” that controlled the discretion of the officers in the field.9 The Court found it fatal to the constitutionality of the roadblock that “the decision to establish the roadblock, as well as its location and duration was solely within the discretion of the troopers,” and that “[n]o advance approval or authorization from any supervisor or superior officer was required to set up the roadblock.”10
This position is consistent with one of the core concerns of the Fourth Amendment — “to assure that an individual’s reasonable expectation of privacy is not subject to arbitrary invasions solely at the unfettered discretion of officers in the field. To this end, the Fourth Amendment requires that a seizure . . . must be carried out pursuant to a plan embodying explicit, neutral limitations on the conduct of individual officers.”11 The same concern is echoed in the Court’s opinion in United States v. Martinez-Fuerte,12 in which the Court analyzed the constitutionality of permanent immigration checkpoints operated by the Border Patrol. The Court stated that
*257[t]he location of a fixed checkpoint is not chosen by officers in the field, but by officials responsible for making overall decisions as to the most effective allocation of limited enforcement resources. We may assume that such officials will be unlikely to locate a checkpoint where it bears arbitrarily or oppressively on motorists as a class.
In this same vein, a noted commentator has stated that
[q]uite clearly, the question of where and when a . . . roadblock is to be conducted should not be left to officers in the field. Rather, what is needed is that these roadblocks be “established by a plan formulated or approved by executive-level officers of the law enforcement agencies involved” which contains “standards . . . with regard to time, place” and similar matters. This is because “in the absence of record evidence that the decision to establish the roadblock was made by anyone other than the officers in the field, the roadblock in question has certain characteristics of a roving patrol,” namely, an appreciable risk of arbitrary basis for the site and time decision.13
The foregoing discussions reflect the concern that few experiences are as fundamental to liberty and freedom as maintaining control over when, how, where and by whom we will be stopped and questioned. It is not reasonable to grant broad powers regarding matters of such critical importance to any and every law enforcement field officer. I conclude, therefore, that roadblocks must be conducted pursuant to a plan developed by supervisory personnel that establishes explicit, neutral criteria for all aspects of the roadblock, thus appropriately limiting the discretion of individual field officers, and protecting each person’s fundamental right to be free from unreasonable invasions of privacy.14
Accordingly, in the present case, because the field officers had the discretion to control the time, the place, and the duration of the roadblock, and because the only limitation on the officer’s discretion that is demonstrated by the record is that the officers had to stop each vehicle, I conclude that the roadblock violated the Fourth Amendment standard of reasonableness, and I thus would reverse *258the trial court’s denial of LaFontaine’s motion to suppress.15
Decided March 16, 1998
Reconsideration denied April 1,1998.
William C. Head, for appellant.
Leslie C. Abernathy, Solicitor, Alice B. Kamerschen, Robert F. Schnatmeier, Assistant Solicitors, for appellee.
I am authorized to state that Chief Justice Benham and Presiding Justice Fletcher join in this concurrence in part and dissent in part.

 Michigan Dept. of State Police v. Sitz, 496 U. S. 444, 450 (110 SC 2481, 110 LE2d 412) (1990).

 Sitz, 496 U. S. at 450 (stating that the balancing analysis set forth in Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. 47, 50-51 (99 SC 2637, 61 LE2d 357) (1979), was the relevant test for determining the constitutionality of roadblocks).

 See Simmons v. Commonwealth of Virginia, 380 SE2d 656, 658 (Va. 1989); Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U. S. 648, 658 (99 SC 1391, 59 LE2d 660) (1979); State v. Larson, 485 NW2d 571, 572 (Min. App. 1992).

 Sitz, 496 U. S. at 454-455.

 E.g., State v. Loyd, 530 NW2d 708 (Iowa 1995).

 Sitz, 496 U. S. at 451-453; United States v. McFayden, 865 F2d 1306, 1312-1313 (D.C. Cir. 1989); Simmons, 380 SE2d at 658-659.

 See State v. Sanchez, 856 SW2d 166, 169-170 (Tex. Crim. App. 1993); Simmons, 380 SE2d at 658-659; State v. One 1987 Toyota Pickup, 447 NW2d 243, 246-248 (Neb. 1989); State v. Loyd, 530 NW2d at 712; State v. Downey, 945 SW2d 102, 109-111 (Tenn. 1997); Campbell v. State, 679 S2d 1168, 1170-1172 (Fla. 1996); People v. Wells, 608 NE2d 578, 581-582 (Ill. App. 3rd Dist. 1993); United States v. McFayden, 865 F2d at 1312-1313 (D.C. Cir. 1989); Larson, 485 NW2d at 572-573.

 Simmons, 380 SE2d at 658 (quoting Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. 47, 51 (99 SC 2637, 61 LE2d 357) (1979)).

 Id. at 658-659.

 Id. at 659.

 (Citations omitted.) Brown v. Texas, 443 U. S. at 51.

 United States v. Martinez-Fuerte, 428 U. S. 543, 559 (96 SC 3074, 49 LE2d 1116) (1976).

 (Footnotes omitted.) 4 W. LaFave, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment, § 10.8 (d) at 697 (3d ed. 1996).

 To the extent that the Court of Appeals of Georgia has rejected the notion that control of a roadblock by supervisory personnel is a prerequisite to the constitutionality of the stop, see, e.g., Mims v. State, 201 Ga. App. 277, 279-280 (410 SE2d 824) (1991), I would overrule those cases.

 Compare State v. Swift, 232 Ga. 535 (1) (207 SE2d 459) (1974), in which this Court approved a roadblock as constitutionally reasonable, but did not discuss the factors that led to that conclusion.