COURT DRAWS WELCOME LINE: RULING BREATHES NEW LIFE INTO FOURTH AMENDMENT

Since the late 1960s, the U.S. Supreme Court has seemed hellbent on
neutralizing the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits subjecting citizens to
unreasonable searches and seizures.

But a ruling last week ordering a halt to narcotics roadblocks is the third
high court opinion this year reinforcing a Fourth Amendment that has too
long been under judicial bombardment.

In a 6-3 opinion, justices ruled that the Fourth Amendment forbids police
from searching people without some specific reason to believe that they did
something wrong. That will produce some harrumphs from the law-and-order
crowd, but it's welcome news for civil libertarians who have long been
concerned about a series of court rulings that upheld seizures and searches
despite the absence of probable cause or reasonable suspicion.

The ruling came in a case involving the Indianapolis Police Department's
use of a roadblocks to detect vehicles carrying illegal drugs. But the
court's opinion has much broader implications.

Writing for the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor expressed concern that
roadblocks to detect crime, when officers have no reason to believe that
someone they stop will turn out to be a criminal, threatened to become ``a
routine part of American life.''

In August 1998, the Indianapolis Police Department set up six checkpoints
to stop cars in high-crime areas. Lawyers for the city freely admitted that
their purpose was to catch drug criminals, not to enforce traffic safety, a
practice that the court has previously upheld as legal.

Police officials made rigorous efforts to standardize officer behavior in
conducting the roadblocks. Officers asked stopped motorists for their
driver's licenses while a second officer with a drug-sniffing dog circled
vehicles. If the officers or dogs detected anything suspicious, vehicles
were pulled aside and searched. Over four months, police stopped 1,161
motorists and made 104 arrests. Fifty-five of the arrests were for drug
offenses and 49 were for other reasons.

James Edmond and Joell Palmer, two drivers whose cars were stopped at the
same inner-city roadblock, sued the city, contending that the stops were
unconstitutional. A federal appeals court in Chicago agreed on a 2-1 vote
that the roadblocks violated the Fourth Amendment.

Last Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling came as a pleasant surprise, especially
since the city had a couple of weighty precedents on its side. In 1976, the
high court ruled that the government could use extra authority, including
roadblocks, to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers, but only near
U.S. borders. In 1989, justices upheld sobriety roadblocks, ruling that the
need to catch drunken drivers outweighed the privacy of innocent motorists.

But a six-member majority, with Chief Justice William Rehnquist and
Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissenting, prudently refused
to extend those precedents and empower police to intrude more deeply into
the privacy rights of drivers and their passengers.

O'Connor's opinion made a distinction between the Indianapolis case, which
was clearly intended to detect individual criminal wrongdoing, and earlier
court decisions that upheld highway checkpoints for broader social benefit,
such as protecting motorists and pedestrians from drunken drivers.

That's an important distinction. Police should have specific reasons to
believe that a motorist has done something wrong before stopping and
searching them. Police already have broad authority to stop motorists for
traffic violations such as running red lights and weaving into oncoming
traffic, but they don't need - and shouldn't have, according to the Fourth
Amendment - the right to indiscriminately stop cars to snoop around for
signs of criminal wrongdoing.

The court's decision sends a clear and heartening message that even this
generally conservative court is willing to draw a line in the judicial sand
to protect the constitutional rights of Americans.