When driving home late from studying in the library, coming home from a friend's house or being the designated driver for a group of friends the last thing you would expect is to get pulled over. Even more unexpected would be to see a roadblock set up by police to issue citations to unsuspecting drivers.

That's exactly what happened near the University of Georgia last weekend. The Georgia State Patrol set up a roadblock near the intersection of Pulaski Street and Prince Avenue in Athens and pulled over nearly 150 vehicles, issuing 15 citations, nine of them for DUI.

Submitting to a sobriety test can be a humiliating experience. People you know might drive by and see you performing the test on the side of the road and the anxiety of having to submit to a test is often overwhelming. Not only is the test embarrassing, DUI arrests can lead to driver's license restrictions, a damaged driving record and expensive fines.

This isn't the first time roadblocks have been set up near the University of Georgia campus. University Police set up roadblocks twice over the summer, once in August and once in June. However, those roadblocks yielded fewer arrests.

Roadblocks are often seen as controversial. Drivers, who might not be doing anything wrong, are stopped and police could ask them to submit to sobriety tests with minimal or no suspicion of offense. Some people who have had nothing to drink are stopped at these roadblocks.

The general concept behind roadblocks might be that people using the public roads automatically consent to submitting to tests and that police should have the right to enforce laws even if they don't suspect the driver is doing anything wrong. If you are pulled over for a DUI or any citation, it is important that you understand your rights. Police can make mistakes by not following proper procedure, not understanding the law themselves or overstepping their bounds.

Source: Red and Black, "Vehicle checkpoint leads to nine DUI arrests," Jacob Demmitt, Dec. 10, 2011