KY: City of Liberty could not conduct checkpoints to look for “city stickers” on cars

The City of Liberty, Kentucky, in a case fraught with irony by the location, cannot conduct checkpoints to stop cars to check whether the car has a affixed a “city sticker” proving that the cars on the street belong to residents. It utterly fails Edmond, Prouse, Sitz, and special needs analysis. This had no valid safety purpose for a checkpoint. Search incident occurred. Singleton v. Commonwealth, 364 S.W.3d 97 (Ky. 2012):

The Commonwealth argues that Prouse should be read as approving traffic checkpoints designed to verify compliance with vehicle registration and operator licensing laws which have no impact upon highway safety. We must disagree. In Prouse, the checkpoint’s purpose was found valid only because the licensing and registration requirements advanced the public interest in highway safety:

We agree that the States have a vital interest in ensuring that only those qualified to do so are permitted to operate motor vehicles, that these vehicles are fit for safe operation, and hence that licensing, registration, and vehicle inspection requirements are being observed. Automobile licenses are issued periodically to evidence that the drivers holding them are sufficiently familiar with the rules of the road and are physically qualified to operate a motor vehicle. The registration requirement and, more pointedly, the related annual inspection requirement in Delaware are designed to keep dangerous automobiles off the road. Unquestionably, these provisions, properly administered, are essential elements in a highway safety program.

Prouse, 440 U.S. at 658 (footnotes omitted).

This point was expressly confirmed in Edmond, “Not only does the common thread of highway safety thus run through Sitz and Prouse, but Prouse itself reveals a difference in the Fourth Amendment significance of highway safety interests and the general interest in crime control.” Edmond, at 40.

As the trial court found, the City of Liberty’s sticker ordinance “does not have as its purpose anything remotely connected to border patrol or highway safety.” We find nothing in the record to refute that finding. It is also apparent that the checkpoint had no information-seeking function of the sort approved in Lidster. The checkpoint’s only purpose was to enforce a revenue-raising tax upon vehicles in the city. Thus, the checkpoint to enforce the sticker ordinance comports with none of the purposes which the United States Supreme Court has found to be important enough to override the individual liberty interests secured by the Fourth Amendment.

[Note: They should be thankful this was resolved in a criminal case rather than an expensive civil rights case like Edmond was.]