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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

The Supreme Court has made bad rulings - we're certainly lucky Dred Scott v. Sandford doesn't still apply - and a 6-3 split indicates some significant disagreement even among the foremost legal minds in the country.

From a common-sense standpoint, I don't see how a DUI checkpoint isn't fundamentally similar to a traffic stop, regardless of the SCOTUS decision that permits them.

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Back to your original comment,

>Thank god one's civil liberties aren't dependent on whether or not you are convinced by them.

Apparently they are dependent on whether SCOTUS is convinced.

A DUI checkpoint is fundamentally different because police are unable to discriminate who they stop. They stop everyone who passes through the checkpoint.

The harm DUI stops try to reduce are far more imminent than regular traffic stops. Drunk driving is far more dangerous than a broken tail light. That difference matters.

Murder's more dangerous, too, but that doesn't mean they can set up a "let's see if you have a dead body in your trunk" checkpoint.

The Fourth Amendment doesn't come with "unless it's super crime-y" exceptions.

You're conflating danger with imminent danger. The immediacy of the danger is highly related to what the state should be allowed to do.

Check these stats:

https://www.westmifflinpolice.com/west-mifflin-dui-checkpoin...

86% of the citations they issued at that “DUI” checkpoint were not for DUIs.

The name is misleading. It’s not a DUI Checkpoint. It’s just a checkpoint. The definition of a police state.

That's not really a helpful statistic. Sure, when police stop people they will find things unrelated to the reasons they stopped them. The statistic that is relevant is the percentage of people stopped that are driving under the influence, i.e., how many drunk drivers they take off the road. Multiply that by the average harm caused by an average drunk driver, and then compare that to the inconvenience/harm caused by creating the traffic stop.

It seems pretty obvious that inconveniencing 100 sober drivers for 5 minutes to prevent a drunk driving death would be worth it, even if 2 others get cited for unrelated offences. Simply citing unrelated citations doesn't really present a full picture.

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