Everybody hold on a second. Illinois v. Lidster does not really fly in the face of existing precedent or logic. This is the same court that decided a couple of years ago that arbitrary roadblocks for general crime detection principles were no good. This case presents an additional nuance. If there is a particularized reason why a particular checkpoint in a particular location should be done at a particular day in time, the court has decided to allow a 10-15 second stop for officers to inquire if the motorist has any information about something. I agree that it goes further than prior Supreme Court precedent as to the facts, but not by much, and it certainly fits within the logic of the cases that overturned roadblocks. In this case, the police were investigating the hit and run death of a 70 year old bicyclist. About one week later, at about the same time of night and about the same place, the police prepared flyers saying “ALERT. . . FATAL HIT & RUN ACCIDENT†and requested assistance in identifying the vehicle and driver in the accident. The defendant in the case was in a minivan, and when he was coming to a stop, swerved and just about hit an officer. The officer smelled alcohol on his breath. At that point he was diverted to another area and given field sobriety maneuvers, which resulted in his arrest. We are not talking about a dragnet here for the purpose of detecting criminality on the part of the detainees. IMHO, there is no way that this activity under the facts of the case could be considered a pretext to jack people up and determine if they were committing a crime.
The court also noted that a blanket rule is not needed to prevent an unreasonable proliferation of police checkpoints, because practical considerations such as limited police resources and community hostility to related traffic tie ups, were likely to inhibit any such proliferation. Furthermore, the 4th amendment’s reasonableness standard provides an additional “important legal limitation†on police use of this kind of information seeking checkpoint.
Three justices concurred in part and dissented in part. They concurred that there is an important distinction between seizing a person to determine whether he committed a crime and seizing a person to ask whether he has any information about an unknown person who committed a crime a week earlier, and they joined the court’s opinion in agreeing that the prior cases dealing with roadblocks compelled a different result. Thus, this portion of the majority opinion is unanimous. However, the three justices dissented from the finding of reasonableness, thinking that the determination was too close to call under the circumstances, and thought that the case should have been remanded for a determination by the Illinois courts on that point.
YMMV
It may be true, as the headline suggested that the court approved random roadblocks, but it certainly is limited. That’s the problem when you get your Supreme Court news from a newspaper.
I realize that this distinction may not make a difference to some people, but it may make a difference to others. Just pointing out something for people to consider. . . .
