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Court of Appeal:
DMV Hearing Is Not Necessarily Marred by Lack of Due Process Based on Prospect
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Fifth District Court of Appeal held yesterday that a 2022 opinion from this district proclaiming that it offends due process for the same employee of the Department of Motor Vehicles to act as both an advocate and an adjudicator does not mean that the prospect of an individual performing both roles means that it actually occurred in any individual case.
Acting Presiding Justice Charles Poochigian authored the opinion. It rejects the contention of motorist Eric Bean Knudsen that, under California DUI Lawyers Assn. v. Department of Motor Vehicles, authored by then-Justice (now Presiding Justice) Brian S. Currey of this district’s Div. Four, structural error rendered the hearing on whether his license should be suspended constitutionally infirm.
Currey wrote:
“Although procedural fairness does not prohibit the combination of the advocacy and adjudicatory functions within a single administrative agency, tasking the same individual with both roles violates the minimum constitutional standards of due process.”
Not Previously Addressed
Poochigian observed that “the issue of how to resolve a driver’s due process challenge to an [administrative] hearing DUI Lawyers has not been addressed by California courts.”
He declared:
“[W]e conclude that to resolve such a challenge, it is first necessary to determine whether a particular driver’s due process right to an impartial adjudicator was violated.”
The jurist said “there was nothing fundamentally unfair” about the hearing at which Knudsen contested that he had been driving with a blood alcohol content in excess of 0.08 percent. He noted that there are 40,000 such hearings conducted each year and that “[f]inding structural error could result in dangerous drivers getting back on the road, contrary to the legislative purpose behind the…system.”
Error Not Inevitable
He explained:
“[S]cenarios can easily be envisioned in which the hearing officer adjudicates without actually acting as an advocate. In particular, as recognized by DUI Lawyers itself, the same agency employee may collect and develop evidence and act as the adjudicator in a single case without offending due process….As such, it is possible that in a particular case, the public hearing officer merely collected and developed evidence and then rendered a decision without actually engaging in advocacy or acting as an advocate.”
After finding that Knudsen’s due-process rights were not necessarily abridged based on the prospect that the hearing officer might also act as an advocate, he determined that in Knudsen’s case, it did occur. He wrote:
“[T]he record reflects inaccurate characterizations of important testimony, questions that were inconsistent with developing testimony, and an error of law that significantly benefited the DMV. We conclude that these considerations collectively demonstrate that the public hearing officer acted as an advocate for the DMV.”
The opinion reverses Kern Superior Court Judge Thomas S. Clark’s denial of Knudsen’s petition for a writ of administrative mandamus and instructs that a new hearing be held.
The case is Knudsen v. Department of Motor Vehicles, 2024 S.O.S. 1222.
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