COURT STRIKES DOWN DRUG CHECKPOINTS

From staff and wire reports

WASHINGTON -- In a significant ruling on the use of police power, the
Supreme Court struck down random roadblocks intended for drug searches,
saying they are an unreasonable invasion of privacy under the Constitution.

Law enforcement in and of itself is not a good enough reason to stop
innocent motorists, the majority concluded Tuesday in the first major ruling
of the new term.

"Because the checkpoint program's primary purpose is indistinguishable from
the general interest in crime control, the checkpoints contravened the
Fourth Amendment," which protects against unreasonable searches and
seizures, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote.

The court's three most conservative justices dissented, saying the
roadblocks Indianapolis set up in high-crime neighborhoods served valuable
public safety and crime-fighting goals. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented.

"Efforts to enforce the law on public highways used by millions of motorists
are obviously necessary to our society," Rehnquist wrote. "The court's
opinion today casts a shadow over what has been assumed ... to be a
perfectly lawful activity."

Thomas joined the entire nine-page dissent. Scalia agreed with Rehnquist
only in part.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, like O'Connor a sometime "swing vote" between the
court's ideological poles, sided with her in the majority.

The American Civil Liberties Union had sued on behalf of two detained
motorists, and the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago eventually
found the practice was probably unconstitutional.

"Today's decision sends a clear message that even a conservative court is
not willing to countenance the serious erosion of our basic constitutional
rights," said Steven Shapiro, ACLU's legal director.

O'Connor stressed that the high court ruling does not affect other police
roadblocks such as border checks and drunken-driving checkpoints, which have
already been found constitutional.

But the reasoning behind those kinds of roadblocks -- chiefly that the
benefit to the public outweighs the inconvenience -- cannot be applied
broadly, O'Connor wrote.

"If this case were to rest on such a high level of generality, there would
be little check on the authorities' ability to construct roadblocks for
almost any conceivable law enforcement purpose," the opinion said.

During oral arguments in October, several justices seemed troubled by the
notion that by unwittingly driving into the checkpoint, a motorist is open
to a criminal investigation that presumably would not have happened
otherwise.

Drug searches of cars and buses traveling on Interstate 80 in the Poconos
has been a hotly debated legal issue for years.

The practice of looking for drugs on Greyhound buses at the Delaware Water
Gap Toll Plaza was ruled unconstitutional in October by the Pennsylvania
Supreme Court.

The searches, which worked by putting police on the bus and questioning
passengers about their trip and their luggage, had netted significant
amounts of drugs.

A 1995 search at the toll booth plaza snared a 26-pound shipment of crack
cocaine, a national record at the time.

That same year the strategy caught Belisario Polo, an Ohio man carrying 100
grams of crack cocaine in his luggage. Last month, the state's highest court
agreed with Rosenblum that the search was unconstitutional.

Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Stephan A. Zappala, writing for the
majority, said "there was absolutely no justification for the intrusion"
because "the stop of the bus was unsupported by reasonable suspicion or
probably cause."

Rosenblum said the message is simple: "You need to have probable cause to
invade the privacy of any human being in a bus or a car."

Staff writer Joe McDonald contributed to this report.