The impact of a recent Supreme Court decision continues to reverberate around the country. As we’ve discussed, Birchfield v. North Dakota, which was decided a little over a year ago, was an important case that led to changes in the way law enforcement officials handle certain drunk driving cases. The Supreme Court decided that warrantless breath tests were allowed, but found that in most cases, warrantless blood tests were an unconstitutional invasion of a person’s rights.
Since Birchfield, courts and prosecutors and police and legislators across the country have been scrambling trying to implement new rules and reinterpret old ones. States have been under pressure to comply with the recent Supreme Court ruling, but sometimes feel as if they’re flying blind, with many specific questions remaining to be answered. As part of this effort to comply with the new law of the land, some states are being forced to introduce new laws, changing prior practice and angering certain groups along the way.
An example of this just occurred in Tennessee, where the legislature rolled out a comprehensive change to the state’s drunk driving laws. The changes managed to simultaneously anger the national anti-drunk driving group Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) and a state association of criminal defense attorneys. The former believes the law is too lax, the latter believes it’s improperly stringent.
So what does the new law say? The law, which took effect on July 1st, eliminates some charges for those who refuse to submit to certain drugs and alcohol impairment tests. Lawmakers have passed a rule that says drunk drivers who refuse to submit to a blood alcohol test can still have their driver’s license suspended, but cannot face additional fines or jail time as a result of refusing.
Lawmakers say they passed the law to comply with the Birchfield decision, which ruled that implied-consent laws were unconstitutional in some cases. The goal is to change the law to comply with the ruling and to do that legislators needed to create a new law that does not criminalize a suspected drunk driver’s refusal to submit to a blood test.
The problem, according to MADD, is that Tennessee is prioritizing the rights of drunk drivers over the rights of the larger community to be free from dangers on the road. MADD has attacked the legislation as an example of lawmakers being soft on crime. The Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers say that they don’t like the new law either as it stiffen penalties for some drunk driving offenses. They also feel the law should go farther in making clear that warrantless blood tests are unconstitutionally improper in the vast majority of cases.
The lawmakers who have found themselves under fire say they’re only doing what they feel is required to bring Tennessee into alignment with the Supreme Court ruling. Additionally, legislators say if they had failed to take action Tennessee would’ve lost federal revenue as a punishment, jeopardizing other public safety programs.
Source: “MADD is…mad about changes to Tennessee DUI law,” by Mike Osborne, published at WMOT.org.
