A good deal of our time these days is spent trying, not only to mitigate the punishment a client might receive in a criminal case, but also trying to lessen the effects on his ability to find a job. One of the newest concerns we have run across is that of clients attempting to get T.W.I.C. cards. T.W.I.C. is short for Transportation Worker Identification Credential. It's an identification card issued by the Transporation Safety Administration (TSA) to people who are going to be working at certain places where special security access is required, such as a port. T.W.I.C. has been around for a few months now, and it's estimated that in the neighborhood of a million-and-a-half workers will need one for their jobs. In the past few months, we have had a handful of clients who are truck drivers who need T.W.I.C. cards in order to make deliveries to TSA regulated sites.
In order to get a T.W.I.C. card, you have to pass a criminal background check. Some of the types of offenses that can disqualify you from a T.W.I.C. card include unlawful possession of a firearm (i.e., Unlawfully Carrying a Weapon or Possession of a Prohibited Weapon), "misrepresentation," whatever that means (Does False Report to a Peace Officer or Failure to Identify count?), and possession with intent to distribute a controlled substance. According to TSA's website, it's not even necessary to be convicted to be disqualifed. A "guilty" or "no contest" plea to a plea bargain for deferred adjudication is a disqualification, as is merely being presently charged with one of these offenses. If you are a truck driver, you should add T.W.I.C. disqualification to your long list of potential worries if you are charged with a crime. Certainly, you should not consider entering any type of plea bargain agreement unless you have checked into the possible effects on your ability to work in areas regulated by the TSA.
The Seguin Police Department has begun running random traffic roadblocks. With a photo of an officer captioned "Just Checking" detaining someone at a roadblock, the Seguin Gazette-Enterprise reported that the Seguin Police Department recently conducted a roadblock in a heavily-Hispanic neighborhood of Northwest Seguin, stopping over 215 drivers, with plans to run more such roadblocks over the coming months.
The Seguin Police Department apparently forgot to check whether or not such roadblocks are legal. They aren't. Of the 215 drivers stopped, 43 received citations. But besides the dubious wisdom behind stopping 172 innocent people for no good reason at all, a more important reason not to do them is that random check points have been illegal in Texas for 16 years. In Holt v. State, 887 S.W.2d 16 (Tex.Crim.App. 1994), the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that police roadblocks are illegal unless they are adopted pursuant to a statewide plan authorized by the Legislature. At every single session of the Legislature since the Holt decision, there has been an attempt to pass a statewide plan to allow roadblocks, and every single attempt has failed.
In 2008, the Department of Public Safety announced that it had requested a Texas Attorney General opinion concerning the legality of checkpoints and that it intended to roll out a statewide plan for roadblocks. Shortly after the announcement, DPS backtracked after widespread protests from legislators and state civil rights groups. In fact, since Holt, only one Texas appellate case has upheld the legality of checkpoints, but that case involved the authority of game wardens to randomly stops boats to check for safety equipment, which the Legislature has specifically allowed by statute. Not only are the Seguin police detaining people illegally at roadblocks, but any evidence seized at an illegal roadblock is inadmissible in any subsequent criminal case. In my business, you don't usually make many guarantees, but I can guarantee you that any case our office gets out of an illegal Seguin police roadblock is getting a suppression motion filed, and any client stopped at such a roadblock is getting referred to a plaintiff's attorney. Does the City of Seguin have it's liability insurance paid up? Just checking.
Seguin has been pretty excited for the past several months, watching the construction of the new Caterpillar plant, and waiting for the jobs that it promises for an ailing local economy. But before you get too excited about, and start looking forward to, that good-paying Caterpillar position, you might want to look back a few years at that criminal record that you forgot about, the one you thought no longer existed.
Earlier today, I ran into someone who works for Caterpillar, and who is well-acquainted with their hiring practices (for obvious reasons, I will not divulge a name or where we met). According to this person, there are a lot of things that can keep you from getting a job at Caterpillar, but here is one thing that will pretty much guarantee being turned down: an arrest for a drug charge, including misdemeanor Possession of Marijuana.
Even if the case is old, even if you completed deferred adjudication, even if the State dismissed the case and apologized to you in open court, that arrest for that joint in your car console so very long ago may be the final thing that stands between you and a job at Cat. Caterpillar runs complete background checks on its applicants (including for misdemeanors), and a drug arrest is a giant black mark. As I have said several times before on this blog, your misdemeanor drug case really isn't over until you have gone back and had the record of your arrest expunged, or the record of any deferred adjudication sealed from private parties. And your search for a good job, like the ones being offered at Caterpillar, hasn't really begun until you get your arrest record in order. If you work as hard at getting your criminal history cleaned up as you did getting your case dismissed in the first place, maybe you can start working hard at a place like Caterpillar.