Pubdate: Tue, 06 Apr 1999 Source: Sacramento Bee (CA) Copyright: 1999 The Sacramento Bee Contact: P.O.Box 15779, Sacramento, CA 95852 Feedback: http://www.sacbee.com/about_us/sacbeemail.html Website: http://www.sacbee.com/ Forum: http://www.sacbee.com/voices/voices_forum.html MORE LEEWAY FOR POLICE IN DRUG SEARCHES IN CARS Police officers who have probable cause to search a car for illegal drugs can search the personal belongings of passengers who are under no suspicion of illegal activity, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday. It is the latest decision expanding police authority over motorists and their passengers. The 6-3 decision overturned a ruling last year by the Supreme Court of Wyoming, which said 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 be longings. The closed container in this case was a purse belonging to a passenger in a car that police in Wyoming had stopped for speeding. The driver said he used a hypodermic syringe, visible in his shirt pocket, to administer drugs, and police clearly had probable cause to search the car, the court said. Despite knowing the purse belonged to the passenger 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 the passenger's conviction for drug possession. In his majority opinion Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia said the Wyoming court had drawn a distinction incorrectly, 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," he said. It would be confusing for the police and local judges, Scalia said, if a national rule were set that allowed searches of some containers in cars but not others, depending upon who claimed them. "One would expect passenger-confederates to claim everything as their own," he said, prompting a "bog of litigation" to resolve whether the officers acted correctly. Scalia 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. 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 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 did not involve a passenger, and since then courts have disagreed on the implications for closed containers that police actually 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 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 in the 1979 decision, from which then-Associate Justice Rehnquist had dissented. In his opinion Monday, 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 Monday's ruling, that police do not have the right to search a passenger whom they do not suspect of wrongdoing. Legal experts who have tracked the court's cases on car searches said the ruling was more of a clarification than a bold departure. "This is not so much new as it is more of the same," said Boston University law professor Tracey Maclin. "All these decisions basically say that once you get in your car, you are fair game. It is significant, though, because it affects potentially millions of people." Defense lawyers said they were outraged. "We're becoming a police state. This ruling tells the police that when they pull over a car to investigate a driver, they can search any one of us in the vehicle for any reason or no reason whatsoever," said attorney Larry S. Pozner, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. But Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations, praised the court "for giving officers the tools they need to do their jobs. Officers must be free of unreasonable, confusing and unworkable restrictions on what may be searched." - --- MAP posted-by: Rich O'Grady