There are "stops" all the time without suspicion of a crime. As a passenger, I went through a sobriety check point last week, where the police officer asked for ID, and then asked the driver if he had been drinking. Every car that passed through that part of town during that hour or so did the same.

The key there is that every car that passed through that part of town during that hour or so did the same.

You can set up checkpoints as per Federal law (though your state may vary--some states have provisions against it, in which case your recourse is to state, not Federal law). However, these checkpoints must be indiscriminate: they have to stop everybody that passes them while they're active.

A cop cannot just pull a single car over to see what's going on. He has to have reason.

True, but I believe such stops have to be for every car passing through a checkpoint or some other non-discriminatory 'random' way (every 4th car, for example).

The stop in question here was clearly unconstitutional, as the appellate court held in their decision for the defendant. Other non-DUI style checkpoint stops without reasonable suspicion of a crime would similarly be unconstitutional.

    Is there some way to seek damages for the violation of your constitutional rights?

Sure "just" sue them.

Can you sue someone simply for the violation of your constitutional rights? In this case, the defendant had to pay fines, was a victim of false arrest, spent 25 days in jail and changed jobs to avoid driving through the town.

What I'm asking is, if you hadn't suffered such injustices, and had just been pulled over and let go without a fine or charges, would you still have grounds to sue the city simply over the violation of your constitutional rights? (that is, just for the unlawful seizure under the 4th amendment) How much damages would be appropriate in such a situation?

You have to be able to show you've suffered an injury (in the legal sense) that gives you standing to sue. Just getting pulled over and let go might count as such an injury, but how much can you reasonably expect in compensatory damages? It's not worth the time and money.

Yeah, perhaps a better solution might be to have the federal or state government impose fines on local city governments for incidents where citizens' constitutional rights are infringed. I'm not as interested in personal compensation for the injury as I am making sure that cities and police can't violate citizen's rights without consequences that ensure that the activity isn't repeated.

The fact that this city was collecting 61% of their annual revenue through regular police stops (many of which seem to be unconstitutional) is alarming. There has to be a better solution than to just appeal or sue for compensatory damages, which in most cases, will have little to no affect on the city. Even the $30K damages in this case seems small compared to the more than $1 million they collected in 2006 alone.

It seems like they should be subject to substantial fines, if not jail time for the officers or judges that are involved in these stops and cases. It just seems wrong that a city can arrest and jail someone for almost a month for not paying a $1,580 fine, but no one in the city government gets jail time for violating the constitutional rights of thousands of citizens, while making millions from their disregard of the law.

I would assume so.

Your rights are your rights. In my mind a few 1000$ but i dont actually know. In practice the proceeding legal battle would probably not be worth it.