Court bans pulling license in invalid DUI arrests

The state cannot suspend a driver's license for refusing to take a breath test if the motorist was not lawfully arrested, a sharply divided Florida Supreme Court ruled Thursday in a pair of cases from Duval and Polk counties.

"It's about time," said Tampa lawyer Kevin Hayslett, who said the court ruling means the same rules apply to administrative drivers license suspensions as apply to criminal proceedings after a motor vehicle arrest.

"In the simplest terms," Hayslett said, the Supreme Court "applied the same rules of play to the administrative hearing as the criminal hearing."

For the past three years, different rules applied in the Tampa Bay area, after an earlier decision by the 2nd District Court of Appeal. Under that earlier decision — overturned by Thursday's Supreme Court ruling — a person could lose his license administratively even if a judge ruled in a criminal proceeding that a traffic stop was invalid.

"I went from winning 77 percent of my (administrative) hearings to winning 21 percent of my hearings" after the 2nd DCA ruling, Hayslett said.

The Supreme Court's 4-3 majority noted Florida's "implied consent" law allows suspensions only for valid arrests.

"Florida law does not require an individual to submit to a breath alcohol-detection test simply because that person possesses a driver's license," the majority wrote in the unsigned opinion.

The ruling also says administrative hearing officers can still determine whether arrests are lawful although specific authority for such decisions was removed from a law outlining their duties in 2006.

"To remove that consideration from the hearing officer's review would allow illegal suspensions without any possibility of a meaningful process to challenge the legality of the suspension," the majority wrote, adding that would violate a motorist's constitutional due process rights.

The validity of an arrest is an issue that continues to fall within the hearing officers' authority to determine whether police had "probable cause" for an arrest and whether a motorist "refused to submit to any such test" because of the requirement that breath tests must be lawful, the majority concluded.

Both issues were certified to the Supreme Court as questions of great public importance by the 1st District Court of Appeal.

Licenses can be suspended for a year for a first refusal to take a breath test and 18 months for each subsequent refusal.

In dissent, Chief Justice Charles Canady wrote that the majority has expanded hearing officers' authority beyond the scope of their legal powers and he noted licensed drivers are responsible for knowing the law.

"They are therefore on notice of the limited grounds for challenging an administrative suspension and that the lawfulness of a suspension will be upheld without regard to whether the suspension was incident to a lawful arrest," Canady wrote.

"Under the dissent's view police may suspend an individual's driver's license on a whim without following the requirements of law," the majority responded.

Justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and James Perry fully concurred with the majority opinion while Justice Peggy Quince agreed only with the result.

Quince wrote that she supported requiring that drivers be given an opportunity to appeal a suspension because otherwise the implied consent law would be unconstitutional, but she disagreed with the opinion's "statutory construction."

Justices Ricky Polston and Jorge Labarga concurred with Canady's dissent.