COURT UPHOLDS PRIVACY RIGHTS

A generally law-and-order oriented U.S. Supreme Court justifiably handed
civil libertarians a victory in ruling that it is unconstitutional for
police to use sobriety checkpoint-type means to enforce drug laws.

The 6-3 majority included the court's two swing votes, Justices Sandra Day
O'Connor and Arthur Kennedy, who often side with conservatives.

In writing the majority opinion, O'Connor took special care to note that
the decision does not affect the court's earlier approval of sobriety
checkpoints.

There is a critically important constitutional distinction between the
widely used and generally popular sobriety checkpoints and the Indianapolis
practice of stopping drivers and looking for illegal drugs.

The difference is that the primary purpose of sobriety checkpoints is
traffic safety - getting drunks off the road - and only incidentally to
cite people for driving under the influence.

But the only significant purpose of the Indianapolis program is to make
arrests. As such, the court ruled, standard rules governing probable cause,
and the need for search warrants must prevail over the convenience to
police of using traffic stops.

In a summary, the court wrote, "Because the checkpoint program's primary
purpose is indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control,
the checkpoints violate the Fourth Amendment. ... The rule that a search or
seizure is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment absent individualized
suspicion of wrongdoing has limited exceptions."

In retrospect, the court had telegraphed its philosophy in denying another
exception to the Fourth Amendment. It ruled last year that an immigration
officials could not board buses at the border, open luggage bins and pat
down soft-sided bags looking for drugs without cause.

In her ruling, O'Connor pointed out that if strict limits were not placed
on exceptions to the Fourth Amendment - which contains one of the most
basic rights in the Constitution - "authorities would be able to establish
checkpoints for virtually any purpose so long as they also included a
license or sobriety check."