DUI Checkpoints in South Carolina: No Authorizing Statute, Two Statutory Limits

The absence is provable rather than assumed. A full-text search of the South Carolina Code of Laws on the General Assembly's own site returns a single result for the singular checkpoint, a single result for the plural checkpoints, nothing at all for roadblock, and one result each for roadblocks and road blocks. Every one of those hits sits in Title 56, Chapter 5, and they resolve to Section 56-5-6525, Section 56-5-6540(B), and Section 56-5-2953(B). South Carolina has no statute of the kind Florida enacted to authorize checkpoints and no statute of the kind Texas passed to authorize a narrow stolen-vehicle scheme. Sobriety checkpoints operate here under Fourth Amendment case law, and the General Assembly has legislated only around their edges.

Section 56-5-6525 is the sharper of the two limits. Subsection (A) tells the Department of Public Safety and any other law enforcement agency not to use a Click It or Ticket campaign or a similar endeavor of systematic checkpoints or roadblocks as a law enforcement tool where the principal purpose is to detect and ticket a seat belt violator, on either a primary or a secondary basis. Subsection (B) closes the obvious workaround: nobody may be cited at a checkpoint established to stop all drivers on a certain road for a period of time for having unbuckled to retrieve the documentation the checkpoint requires them to produce. Both provisions came from 2001 Act No. 65 and 2005 Act No. 147.

Section 56-5-6540(B) supplies the closest thing the code has to a description of a lawful South Carolina checkpoint: a driver's license check, safety check, or registration check conducted at a checkpoint established to stop all drivers on a certain road for a period of time. The defining feature in the statutory language is that all drivers are stopped, not a selected few. At such a stop no seat belt citation may issue to the driver or a passenger unless the driver is cited for violating another motor vehicle law, though everyone must buckle up before departing, and a refusal to do so may be charged as a primary violation. Section 56-5-6540(D) adds that a vehicle, driver, or occupant must not be searched, nor may consent to search be requested, solely because of a safety belt violation.

If a stop turns into a DUI investigation, Section 56-5-2953 governs the recording. The incident-site video must not begin later than the activation of the officer's blue lights, must include any field sobriety tests administered, and must include the arrest and the person being advised of Miranda rights. Section 56-5-2953(A)(1)(b) states plainly that a refusal to take a field sobriety test does not constitute disobeying a police command. Subsection (B) is where roadblocks reappear: in circumstances including road blocks, traffic accident investigations, and citizens' arrests, where an arrest has been made and the video equipment has not been activated by blue lights, failure to produce the recording is not alone a ground for dismissal, but recording must begin as soon as it is practicable.

The testing rules follow from Section 56-5-2950. Implied consent applies once a person has been arrested for driving under the influence, breath is offered first, urine may be ordered if the officer has reasonable suspicion of drugs other than alcohol, the breath sample must be collected within two hours of the arrest and any additional samples within three hours, and the simulator test before the breath test must read between 0.076 and 0.084 percent.

Refusing the chemical test, or registering an alcohol concentration of fifteen one-hundredths of one percent or more, triggers an administrative suspension under Section 56-5-2951(A), with the arresting officer issuing a notice of suspension effective from the date of the alleged violation. Within thirty days the driver may request a contested case hearing before the Office of Motor Vehicle Hearings and either enroll in the Ignition Interlock Device Program under Section 56-5-2941 or obtain a temporary alcohol license for a one hundred dollar fee, which allows unrestricted driving pending the outcome.

Section 56-5-2952 sets the filing fee for the contested case hearing before the Office of Motor Vehicle Hearings of the Administrative Law Court at two hundred dollars. A seat belt citation issued in breach of Section 56-5-6525 or Section 56-5-6540(B) is challenged in the summary court hearing it, where Section 56-5-6540(F) gives the choice of a judge or a jury and Section 56-5-6540(G) routes an appeal to the court of common pleas under Section 18-3-10 or Section 14-25-95. The seat belt penalty itself is capped by Section 56-5-6540(A) at twenty-five dollars with no court costs, assessments, or surcharges, no more than fifty dollars for any one incident, no custodial arrest except on a warrant, no entry on the DMV or SLED record, and no report to the insurer, and Section 56-5-6550 bars any license points.

Section 56-5-6560 requires the officer to complete a Department of Public Safety data collection form recording age, gender, and race or ethnicity for every stop that ends without a citation or an arrest, which is the record a checkpoint complaint can be measured against.