State v. Newsom

A Georgia State Patrol trooper stopped Christopher Newsom after watching him turn left into the right lane of Georgia Highway 61, and the trooper later determined Newsom had been drinking. The State charged Newsom with DUI and an improper turn, but Newsom argued that the turn statute, OCGA § 40-6-120 (2) (B), was too vague to tell drivers which lane they had to end up in, pointing to a prior case that struck down an earlier version of the law. The Carroll County trial court agreed and dismissed the charges, also ruling the stop lacked probable cause. The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed. It explained that the legislature had fixed the vagueness problem from the earlier case by changing one word in the statute, so the law now clearly requires a driver to complete a left turn in the leftmost lane moving in the same direction. Because the statute was not unconstitutionally vague as applied to Newsom, the court reversed the dismissal and sent the case back to the trial court.

OCGA § 40-6-120 (2) (B) is not unconstitutionally vague as applied to Newsom because, unlike its predecessor, the current statute clearly and consistently requires a driver turning left to finish the turn in the far-left lane moving in the same direction, giving drivers fair notice of what the law demands.

The ruling preserves prosecutors' ability to charge drivers under Georgia's left-turn law and confirms that police can stop drivers for exiting a turn in the wrong lane. It also guides trial courts statewide on how to read this statute alongside other traffic laws.

Reversed and remanded

1. The court applied the fair-notice test under the Due Process Clause, which asks whether a criminal law is so unclear that ordinary people cannot understand what conduct it forbids.
2. It compared the current statute to an earlier version struck down in McNair v. State, which used the word 'leave' and could be read two opposite ways about which lane a turning driver had to occupy.
3. The 2010 amendment replaced 'leave' with 'exit,' a word that dictionaries consistently define as departing from a place, eliminating the earlier statute's double meaning and leaving only one clear instruction: finish the turn in the far-left lane.
4. The court found this reading confirmed by the neighboring subsection, OCGA § 40-6-120 (2) (C), which likewise requires drivers to exit a multi-lane intersection in the same relative lane they entered, and by the presumption that lawmakers intentionally changed a statute's meaning when they change its wording.
5. The court held that the trial judge wrongly treated Georgia Highway 61's northbound and southbound lanes as one 'roadway' under OCGA § 40-6-40 (c); because that statute defines a divided highway's two directions as separate roadways with only two lanes each, it does not apply here and creates no conflict with the turn statute.
6. Because the vagueness ruling failed, the trial court's related conclusion that the stop lacked probable cause also failed, and the court noted that reasonable suspicion, not probable cause, is the correct standard for evaluating a traffic stop.

• DUI charge
• left-turn statute
• void for vagueness
• traffic stop
• due process