No Fourth Amendment For You! The “DUI Exception” to the Constitution

     Perhaps no moment was more exciting for me as a brand-new Public Defender, only weeks out of law school, than when my first Driving Under the Influence (DUI) case landed on my desk. Highlighter in hand, I tore into the police reports like a kid on Christmas morning. Aha! No probable cause for the traffic stop! No Miranda rights! No preservation of the evidence! Confident that I was about to teach the local police force a valuable lesson in criminal procedure, I filed a motion to suppress evidence, based on my belief that the stop and arrest violated numerous provisions of the U.S. and state Constitution, and smugly sat back to await the day of reckoning. Luckily for me, one of the more experienced attorneys in my office got wind of my grand scheme and saved me from a lifetime worth of embarrassment at the hands of the prosecutor's office. It came as a…