The Sedgwick County Sheriff's Department announced today that they will be conducting a sobriety check lane in Eastern Sedgwick County on Friday June 13, 2008 starting at 11:30 p.m and ending at 2:00 a.m. on Saturday morning.
If you are driving in the area of Eastern Sedgwick County during these times you are liable to be detained by law enforcement officials for no reason other than the fact that you happen to be driving in this area. We can all applaud the stated goal of decreasing the number of intoxicated drivers on the roads. However, given the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, one should ask whether it is a proper use of the police powers of government to seize law abiding drivers and our passengers without any suspicion of wrongdoing simply because they happened to be at a certain location at a certain time. In one DUI checkpoint conducted by the Sedgwick County Sheriff's Department in the last year 635 drivers were seized and detained along with their passengers. 10 DUI arrests were made. This checkpoint had a success rate of 0.65 percent. This success rate is not unusual for DUI checkpoints. With such a low success rate it is certainly a fair question to ask whether a seizure in a DUI checkpoint is reasonable and therefore legal.
Do not drink and drive. But if you wish to avoid an arguably unreasonable seizure by government officials, you might wish to avoid driving in Eastern Sedgwick County during the hours of 11:30 P.m Friday June 13, 2008 and 2:00 p.m on Saturday June 14, 2008.
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