Under 18? I’m Sorry, You Have No Rights.
Sometimes I am amazed at the laws that people are expected to accept. I recently found out that several states in the U.S. have laws that require minors to submit to breath tests anytime and anywhere the police decide to administer them.
Now I’m not talking about minors who are driving. These laws can be used to stop someone walking down the street, or even in a private home, and give them a breath test to determine if they have been drinking.
In what appears to be an unusual moment of clarity, a federal judge in Detroit, Michigan recently struck down Michigan’s Minor in Possession (MIP) law.
According to an article in the Detroit Free Press, The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan had filed a lawsuit on behalf of four people in two separate incidents. One of the women represented by the ACLU, Ashley Berden, was 18 when she attended a party at a friends house. “After she left the party, the Michigan ACLU said Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had mistakenly left behind. Police went to Berden’s house at 4 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test, the ACLU said.”
“Although police didn’t have a warrant, the ACLU claimed Berden was informed that she would be violating the law if she refused the test. She registered a .00 percent blood-alcohol level. The state MIP law considers a pedestrian under 21 to be intoxicated with a blood-alcohol level of .02 or more.”
“This is a tremendous victory for the civil liberties of young adults,” Kary Moss, Executive Director of the ACLU of Michigan said in a prepared statement. “For years, police officers throughout Michigan have violated the rights of countless college students and others under the age of 21 by forcing them to submit to breathalyzers without a court order.”
Are you as surprised by this as I am? Wouldn’t you be shocked if your teenager came home and told you they were forced to take a breath test under threat of going to jail? Wouldn’t you have thought there would have been a public uproar over this long before now? Have we gotten so comfortable with random drug testing that we will allow the police to test our youngsters for anything anytime they feel like it?
Thank goodness there are still a few judges out there willing to stand up for our rights.