Pubdate: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 Source: San Diego Union Tribune (CA) Copyright: 1999 Union-Tribune Publishing Co. Contact: http://www.uniontrib.com/ Forum: http://www.uniontrib.com/cgi-bin/WebX JUSTICES EXPAND POWER OF POLICE TO SEARCH CARS WASHINGTON -- Police officers who have probable cause to search a car for illegal drugs can search the personal belongings of passengers who are themselves under no suspicion of illegal activity, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in its latest decision expanding police authority over motorists and their passengers. The 6-3 decision overturned a ruling by the Supreme Court of Wyoming, which held last year that a closed package belonging to a passenger could not be included in a general search of a car and its contents unless there was reason to suspect the passenger of a crime or the driver of concealing evidence in the passenger's belongings. The closed container in this case was a purse belonging to a passenger in a car that police in Wyoming had stopped for speeding. When the driver said that he used a hypodermic syringe, visible in his shirt pocket, to administer drugs, police clearly had probable cause to search the car. Despite knowing that the purse belonged to the passenger, Sandra Houghton, and not to the driver, police searched it as well, finding methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. The Wyoming Supreme Court found the search unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, overturning Houghton's conviction for drug possession. In his majority opinion yesterday, Justice Antonin Scalia said the Wyoming court had incorrectly drawn a distinction, on the basis of ownership, between containers that could be the subject of a warrantless automobile search and those that could not. "Passengers, no less than drivers, possess a reduced expectation of privacy with regard to the property that they transport in cars," Scalia said. He said that, in balancing the "substantial" law enforcement interests in a complete search against a passenger's reduced expectation of privacy, the law enforcement side was clearly the weightier. "A `passenger's property' rule would dramatically reduce the ability to find and seize contraband and evidence of crime," Scalia said. The majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion that Justices David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg also signed. The decision, Wyoming vs. Houghton, No. 98-184, addressed an issue that had remained in doubt since the court ruled in 1982 that a search of a lawfully stopped vehicle could include "every part of the vehicle and its contents that may conceal the object of the search." That case, United States vs. Ross, did not involve a passenger, and courts have disagreed since then on the ruling's implications for closed containers that police knew or should have known did not belong to the driver. In barring the search of the passenger's property, the Wyoming Supreme Court relied on a different U.S. Supreme Court precedent, a 1979 decision that police could not search patrons in a bar simply on the basis of a warrant to search the premises and the bartender. "A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of criminal activity does not, without more, give rise to probable cause to search that person," the court said then in Ybarra vs. Illinois, a decision from which then- Associate Justice Rehnquist had dissented. In his opinion yesterday, Scalia said the barroom precedent was inapplicable because it involved "the unique, significantly heightened protection afforded against searches of one's person." It remains the case, after yesterday's ruling, that police do not have the right to search a passenger whom they do not suspect of wrongdoing. In his dissenting opinion, Stevens said the majority had overstated the law enforcement interests involved in the case. "Certainly the ostensible clarity of the court's rule is attractive," Stevens said. But he added, "A rule requiring a warrant or individualized probable cause to search passenger belongings is every bit as simple as the court's rule; it simply protects more privacy." Meanwhile, the court took the following actions: - - Ruled that judges cannot impose stiffer punishments on criminal defendants who plead guilty but refuse at sentencing to give details about the crime. The 5-4 ruling in a Pennsylvania drug case said holding such defendants' silence against them would impose "an impermissible burden on the exercise of the constitutional right against compelled self-incrimination." - - Refused to review a South Carolina judge's order that barred pretrial reporting on a secretly recorded conversation between a murder defendant and his lawyer. The justices turned down a Columbia, S.C., newspaper's arguments that the judge's 1997 "prior restraint" on publication was unconstitutional. - - Refused to revive a Waco, Texas, television reporter's libel lawsuit over coverage of a federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993. John McLemore's lawsuit accused Dallas-Forth Worth station WFAA-TV of airing reports which implied that McLemore had tipped the religious sect about the raid. A Treasury Department investigation cleared McLemore of any misconduct. The report said the Davidians were alerted by a postal driver, who had been told by a Waco TV photographer that a raid was imminent. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D