TRENTON — German Marquez made New Jersey legal history Monday. From his prison cell. The 27-year-old Plainfield man won a long legal battle against New Jersey Monday when the state Supreme Court ruled that police must change the way they handle DWI suspects who don’t understand English. The ruling sprang from a 2007 DWI case in which Marquez claimed...
The New Jersey Supreme Court in Trenton in this file photo.TRENTON — German Marquez made New Jersey legal history Monday. From his prison cell.
The 27-year-old Plainfield man won a long legal battle against New Jersey Monday when the state Supreme Court ruled that police must change the way they handle DWI suspects who don’t understand English.
The ruling sprang from a 2007 DWI case in which Marquez claimed that he refused to take a breath test because he did not understand the arresting officer’s instruction that the test is legally required. Marquez speaks only Spanish.
But the victory won’t get Marquez out of the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in Yardville, where he is serving time for an unrelated drug offense. In fact, he hardly cares about Monday’s decision, said his lawyer Michael Blacker, who said he took up the case because he thought it involved a wider legal issue.
The 4-3 ruling compels officers to use a language that suspects understand when informing them the law requires a breath test. The decision could have broad resonance in New Jersey, which has 1.75 million immigrants, about a quarter of whom do not speak English fluently or at all, Census statistics say.
The majority decision, written by Chief Justice Stuart Rabner, directed the state Motor Vehicle Commission and Attorney General’s office to develop methods to inform non-English speakers about the breath-test requirement, which is now relayed to suspects in English through an 11-paragraph statement that is read by a police officer.
At the heart of the case is the state’s "implied consent" law, which since 1966 has required all motorists operating a vehicle on public roads to consent to breath tests. In 1977, the legislature began requiring police to inform suspects that not taking the test is illegal.
Marquez was arrested in 2007 after he rear-ended another car in Plainfield. He was convicted for DWI and refusal to submit to a breath test. Until Monday he had lost appeals in lower courts.
But the high court said the police officer’s efforts to communicate the breath-test requirement in English did not effectively inform him about the test in the same way English speakers would be informed.
Marquez could not be reached for comment Monday in prison. Blacker was pleased with the decision, which vacated Marquez’s refusal conviction and its seven-month license suspension but left intact his DWI conviction and its concurrent three-month suspension.
"We got everything we wanted," Blacker said.
The Attorney General’s office strongly disagreed with the ruling.
"There are over 150 different languages spoken in New Jersey...," said, said spokesman Peter Aseltine. "This ruling effectively provides an immunity claim in a prosecution for violating the refusal statute for any drunk driver who speaks a language that the officer is unable to identify or translate."
He said New Jersey won’t appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, since the case involves state law.
Rabner’s majority ruling analyzed the meaning of the word "inform," which is used in the statute. He quoted from Webster’s Third International Dictionary: "‘To inform’ means to ‘to communicate knowledge’ and ‘make acquainted.’"
Therefore, he wrote, "the statute’s obligation to ‘inform’ calls for more than a rote recitation of English words to a non-English speaker... Such a practice would permit Kafkaesque encounters in which police read aloud a blizzard of words that everyone realizes is incapable of being understood because of a language barrier."
Blacker said that he felt the case was worth taking after seeing the police video of Marquez being told he had to take the breath test.
"I saw it virtually immediately," he said. "You look at the video and the guy’s standing there like, they might as well be talking Klingon to him. He just stands there and has no idea what’s happening."
Justice Jaynee LaVecchia, writing in dissent, contended the Court has eviscerated the "implied consent" law:
"The majority mistakenly transforms the procedural safeguards of the implied consent law into a substantive right under the refusal statute, and makes the fact that motorists on New Jersey’s roadways have given their implied consent to chemical breath tests entirely meaningless."
The majority said the state would be in general compliance with Monday’s decision if it makes wide use of translations of the 11-paragraph statement — in Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, and Spanish — that the Attorney General’s office posted on its web site in April. The state has already asked county prosecutors to inform police departments about the site.
Mitchell Sklar, executive director of the New Jersey Association of Chiefs of Police, said the vast majority of departments in the state — if not all of them — have computers available with Internet access.
"I’m going to assume," he said, "that every department will have the ability to access what the Attorney General is putting out. I’m going to assume that there’s going to be some procedural changes that will be made,"