Pubdate: Wed, 29 Nov 2000 Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA) Copyright: 2000 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Contact: PO Box 120191, San Diego, CA, 92112-0191 Fax: (619) 293-1440 Website: http://www.uniontrib.com/ Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX Author: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times News Service CHECKPOINTS TARGETING DRUGS RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL Court Limits Purpose Of Police Roadblocks WASHINGTON -- Police roadblocks aimed at discovering drugs violate the Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a decision reaffirming the Fourth Amendment prohibition against searches and seizures that are not based on a suspicion of individual wrongdoing. "Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the 6-3 majority. The dissenters were Chief Justice William Rehnquist along with Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The majority agreed with a ruling last year by the federal appeals court in Chicago, holding that the city of Indianapolis violated the Fourth Amendment rights of motorists whom the police stopped at drug-interdiction checkpoints that were set up on city streets six times in 1998. Pulling over cars in sequence, the police would check a driver's license and registration and then walk a specially trained dog around the car to sniff for drugs. The police stopped more than 1,100 cars and made more than 100 arrests. More than half were for drug-related crimes, and the rest were for license problems or other offenses. The Indianapolis case was closely watched by cities and law enforcement agencies around the country. The National League of Cities told the Supreme Court in a brief that other cities were ready to adopt the Indianapolis program if the court upheld it. In a case from Michigan 10 years ago, the Supreme Court upheld sobriety checkpoints as a means of protecting public safety by getting drunken drivers off the road. The court had also ruled in the past that a sniff by a drug-detecting dog, which is commonly used at airports, is so minimally intrusive as not to constitute a search. Taking those precedents together, Indianapolis argued that adding a drug-sniffing dog to a checkpoint could not convert a lawful police practice into one that was unconstitutional. However, O'Connor said the purpose of the checkpoint made all the difference: While sobriety checkpoints served to protect the public from an "immediate, vehicle-bound threat to life and limb," she said, roadblocks for drug detection primarily served the ordinary law-enforcement interest in crime control. In his dissenting opinion, Rehnquist said that because the Indianapolis checkpoints could be used validly to check for alcohol use or license irregularities, it was "constitutionally irrelevant" that the city "also hoped to interdict drugs." Indianapolis had argued that the severity of the drug problem justified the roadblocks. Granting that drugs create "social harms of the first magnitude," O'Connor said, "the gravity of the threat alone" was not sufficient to justify dispensing with individual suspicion. O'Connor said that only in "limited circumstances" had the court been willing to set aside the requirement of individual suspicion. The examples she offered included drug-testing of customs agents, transportation workers and student athletes, which the court's precedents have justified as serving "special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement." Kenneth J. Falk, who brought the case against Indianapolis as legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Indiana affiliate, and who argued the case last month, said yesterday that the decision was an important reaffirmation of the Fourth Amendment principle that "the police cannot conduct a criminal investigation without cause." - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D