RANDOM RULING

Court Gives Minor Victory To Privacy

AT least one branch of the U.S. government is willing to limit the power of
the state when it is brought to bear in the so-called war on drugs.

Yes, drug abuse is a serious problem in this country.

Yes, the manufacture and transportation and sale of illegal drugs is a
proper concern of law enforcement.

But, yes, too, we seem to have gone overboard, particularly in some areas
where the rights of individuals under the U.S. Constitution have been set
aside to justify stepped-up efforts to stop the drug trade and drug use.

One such instance has involved the use by various local and state police
departments of traffic checkpoints set up on busy streets or interstates to
stop all passing motorists and search their vehicles for illegal drugs.

Certain South and lower central Texas highways gained notoriety for these
kinds of sweeping operations, spawning protests from civil rights and civil
liberties activists.

But, this week the Supreme Court issued a ruling on a case out of
Indianapolis where police were using the same kind of procedure to stopped
hundreds of motorists at random who were passing through a particular point
on a roadway.

The court said the random roadblocks violate the Fourth Amendment of the
Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

The key was defining what's reasonable, and the court said this kind of
roadblock is not. Instead, it is an invasion of the privacy of all citizens
stopped, most of whom are guilty of absolutely nothing.

The court's ruling is only a partial check on the power of police to set up
roadblocks to try to find scofflaws. Previous decisions by the court have
upheld the legality of checkpoint programs to find drivers who are drunk,
and it's difficult to discern from news reports alone how the court defines
"reasonable" on the one hand, in the case of trolling for drunks, and
"unreasonable" on the other, trolling for drug mules.

Apparently, the court simply found that the benefit to the public of the
roadblocks does not outweigh the inconvenience to the public of going
through them.

It seems a fine point, but such is the nature of some court rulings.

And a victory is a victory in a national obsession over drug use that has
seen a distinct erosion in individual freedoms as police test the limits of
their abilities to deal with the drug problem.

The case sends a message that needed to be sent: There are, in fact,
limits, even though sometimes that doesn't seem to be the case.

Police believe they have a mandate to do whatever it takes to deal with
drugs, and who can blame them? That's a clear message from other branches
of government that finance and otherwise support this anti-crime activity.

But, the court's ruling makes clear that the mandate is not as sweeping as
some would believe.