Does Michigan Actually Use Drunk Driving Checkpoints?

The Plymouth Fall Festival takes over Kellogg Park and Main Street from Friday September 11 through Sunday September 13, and by Saturday night there will be more patrol cars working the streets around downtown than on any ordinary weekend of the year. Somebody will describe what they drove through as a checkpoint, that description will get repeated at work on Monday, and it will be wrong. Michigan doesn't run sobriety checkpoints, and it hasn't been allowed to for more than thirty years, which turns out to be one of the most useful facts a person arrested on the drive home from the festival can know.

Key takeaways

The Michigan Supreme Court held in 1993 that sobriety checkpoints violate the Michigan Constitution, so they aren't used here even though the United States Supreme Court had approved them under the Fourth Amendment three years earlier.
What increases around events like the Fall Festival is a saturation patrol, which puts extra officers on the road looking for individual driving behavior rather than stopping everyone who passes a fixed point.
Because there's no checkpoint exception in Michigan, every traffic stop here has to rest on reasonable suspicion of something specific, and that reason gets written down.
The stated reason for the stop is often the weakest part of an OWI case, and challenging it can end the case before anyone argues about the breath test.
Dash camera and body camera footage of the driving that supposedly justified the stop has a retention window, so requesting it early matters more than almost anything else you do in the first month.

Did Michigan ever use sobriety checkpoints?

Briefly, and the fight over it became one of the more unusual pieces of Michigan law. The Michigan State Police started a checkpoint pilot program in the 1980s on the recommendation of a drunk driving task force, drivers challenged it, and the case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which held in 1990 that the checkpoints satisfied the Fourth Amendment. That looked like the end of it. On remand, though, the Michigan Supreme Court decided the case again under the state constitution and held in 1993 that suspicionless stops of automobiles for criminal law enforcement violate Article 1, Section 11 of the Michigan Constitution, finding no support in Michigan's constitutional history for the idea that police can seize a car without any suspicion at all. State constitutions can protect more than the federal floor, and here Michigan's does, which is why the practice ended in this state while it continued in others.

Then what is everyone driving through on a festival weekend?

A saturation patrol, which is a genuinely different thing and not merely a rebranded checkpoint. Instead of funneling traffic through a fixed point and contacting every third car, the agency puts extra marked units into a defined area for a defined window, often paid for with traffic safety grant money, and each of those officers spends the shift watching for individual driving. Nobody gets stopped for existing on Ann Arbor Road at midnight. People get stopped for drifting over the fog line, for a brake light out, for rolling the stop at Harvey and Penniman, for a plate light, for leaving the parking lot without headlights. The volume of stops goes up because the number of officers went up, and that's the whole mechanism.

Arrested on the drive home from the festival? The video that shows how you were actually driving doesn't sit on a server forever. Ask for it now.

(734) 453-7806

Why does the difference matter to someone who got arrested?

Because it decides whether the stop itself is open to challenge. In a state that permits checkpoints, an officer defending the stop doesn't need a reason particular to you, since the program itself supplies the justification and the argument moves on to the testing. In Michigan there's no such shortcut, so the officer needs reasonable suspicion of a specific violation, and that reason has to appear in the report, get repeated at the preliminary hearing, and hold up against whatever the video shows. If the stated reason was weaving within the lane, or a stop that lasted a beat too long, or an equipment violation that the footage doesn't clearly establish, the entire case is exposed at the front end. Evidence that comes after a bad stop generally comes out with it, which is why our OWI defense practice starts with the first ninety seconds of the encounter rather than with the number on the breath test.

What does that look like at the 35th District Court?

A festival weekend arrest in Plymouth lands at the 35th District Court, and the first appearance comes quickly. The move that matters early is a request for the in car video, the body camera footage, the dispatch log showing when the unit was assigned to the patrol, and the agency's grant paperwork if the shift was funded as a directed enforcement detail, because those documents establish what the officer was doing on that street that night and what he actually saw before the overhead lights came on. Departments have retention schedules, footage does get overwritten, and a request made in week seven produces a different result than the same request made in week one. Nothing about that process is dramatic. It's paperwork, sent early, that determines whether the reason for the stop can be tested at all.

Does the same rule cover license and insurance checks?

Michigan does allow certain limited stops that aren't based on individual suspicion, and people sometimes point to those to argue that checkpoints are back. Commercial vehicle inspections and border related enforcement work under separate rules, and an officer can still run a plate without stopping anyone, since there's no expectation of privacy in a license plate displayed in public. What none of that permits is stopping ordinary passenger cars at a fixed location to look for drinking drivers. If somebody tells you they went through a drunk driving checkpoint in Michigan, what they went through was traffic control, a crash scene, or a saturation patrol that made a lot of stops in a short stretch of road.

What to remember about the ride home this weekend

The extra cars on the street around Kellogg Park this weekend aren't a checkpoint and don't have checkpoint authority, which means every one of those stops began with an officer deciding he'd seen something specific about how one car was being driven. That decision is written down, it's usually recorded, and it can be wrong. The festival will be over by Sunday evening and the case won't be, so if the weekend ended with a ride to the station, the useful thing to do on Monday isn't to relitigate how many drinks it was, it's to lock down the footage of the driving that supposedly started all of it. Call Boria Law at (734) 453-7806 if a Fall Festival weekend arrest is now your problem. Attorney Aaron J. Boria works these cases from the stop forward, because in Michigan the stop is where the state is most often exposed.

Quick answers

Can I refuse to answer whether I've been drinking?

Yes. You have to provide your license, registration, and proof of insurance, and beyond that you aren't required to answer questions about where you've been or what you've had, and "I'd rather not answer" is a complete response that doesn't give the officer anything. Roadside sobriety exercises are voluntary for most drivers as well, and declining them politely is different from refusing the chemical test at the station, which carries its own consequences.

How long does a traffic stop get to last?

Only as long as it takes to handle the reason for the stop, plus the ordinary tasks that go with it, so an officer can't hold a driver at the roadside indefinitely hoping something develops. When a stop for a plate light stretches out while an officer waits on a second unit or a dog, the length itself becomes a legal issue, and the timestamps in the dispatch log and the video are how that gets proven rather than anyone's memory of how long it felt.

Does it help my case that the officer was working a special enforcement shift?

It can, because grant funded details generate paperwork about the hours worked, the zone covered, and the contacts made, and that record sometimes tells a different story than the report does. It isn't a defense on its own, since being on a directed patrol doesn't make a stop unlawful, but it's one more document that has to line up with the officer's account and occasionally doesn't.