NO ROADBLOCK FOR LIBERTY: SUPREME COURT DRAWS A LINE ON THE DRUG WAR

The long war against drugs has progressively narrowed Fourth Amendment
protections against unreasonable searches and seizures as courts, including
the U.S. Supreme Court, have let the police and other agencies peek, sift
and prod in once-prohibited ways in their hunt for contraband substances.
But last Tuesday the high court finally found a limit. It drew the line at
letting the police set up drug roadblocks and stop all drivers in the hope
of finding illegal drugs.

For many years the courts held that the Bill of Rights required police must
have reason to suspect a person of wrongdoing before stopping him in
public. But the Supreme Court over the last three decades has carved out
exceptions to the rule of individualized suspicion, allowing, for example,
roadblocks to check all passing cars for illegal immigrants in the vicinity
of the border, and checkpoints to assess the sobriety of motorists.

It is through that loophole that police in Indianapolis tried to drive
another drug-war nail in citizens' privacy. On six occasions in 1998 they
stationed 30 officers on a street and seized all passing motorists,
demanding proof of driver's license and registration, assessing the
motorists for signs of drug use, peering into the car and leading a
drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle. Such a seizure was but a minor
inconvenience, Indianapolis asserted, and no different constitutionally
than a sobriety checkpoint.

Three justices -- William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas --
agreed. But the rest of the court wisely refused to put another drug-war
asterisk on the Fourth Amendment. By Indianapolis' logic, police would be
justified in almost any program of seizing passersby, without suspicion, to
troll for evidence of criminal conduct, making such intrusions, the court's
majority wrote, "a routine part of American life." And the day such
seizures become routine, life in this society will no longer be American,
or free, in the way the founders intended.