Judge Sabatino continued in relevant part: Here, the Court considers for the first time whether the analysis in Glover — specifically involving driver’s license revocation laws in Kansas — supports a comparable approach in New Jersey in a setting involving a car owner’s suspended driver’s license. In State v. Donis, the Court confronted the question of whether “suspicionless access” of information returned from an officer’s random query on an MDT violated the New Jersey Constitution. The petitioners in Donis argued that the police should be allowed to conduct MDT queries only when they observe a driver commit a traffic law infraction. The Court disagreed, holding that it “would render MDTs useless as efficient investigative tools.” The majority stated in Donis that “if the MDT informed the officer that the car’s owner had an expired or revoked license, the officer would have adequate grounds to stop that vehicle.” Later in the opinion, the majority elaborated further, noting that “the officers also had determined through a ‘match up’ that the drivers were the registered owners.”
Unlike the Kansas motor vehicle laws at issue in Glover, New Jersey’s regulatory scheme has not markedly distinguished between the severity of offenses that can produce driver’s license suspensions as opposed to revocations. Like Kansas, New Jersey authorizes license suspensions for a variety of offenses and conduct that do not involve driver safety infractions. On the other end of the spectrum, New Jersey drivers may have their licenses suspended — rather than revoked — for driving infractions causing death or bodily injury, and other serious categories of driving related offenses such as DWI. The sharp line in Kansas between revocation-eligible offenses and suspension-eligible offenses is blurred in New Jersey, and the Court therefore declines to rest its constitutional analysis on that basis. Subject to constitutional limitations delineated in the Court’s opinion in this case, a police officer in New Jersey has an equivalent legal basis to stop a vehicle for a suspension-based reason as a revocation-based reason.
The Court’s analysis overlooks that New Jersey drivers can be suspended for non-driving infractions. It also overlooks that the New Jersey’s Constitution has historically provided drivers with greater protections than those provided by the federal constitution in Glover.
