RANDOM SEARCHES FOR DRUGS IN LUGGAGE ALLOWED

State Drug Investigators Have It Down To A Well-practiced Routine.

Pretty much at random, they board a long-haul passenger bus, usually a
Greyhound, at a bus depot. They ask travelers to pair up with their
baggage. And if the owner of a bag demurs, police have the bus driver
declare the baggage abandoned, open it, then hunt for drugs and the
identity of the owner.

The routine is commonly used at spots such as a heavily traveled bus stop
in Breezewood, a Bedford County interchange on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
More than occasionally, it nets police a drug runner.

But the routine might have just been hobbled.

A new state Supreme Court ruling throws out evidence from a 1995 crack
arrest in which police running a random search hunted through luggage
aboard a bus that had just crossed into Pennsylvania from New Jersey on
Interstate 80. At least nine similar arrests are awaiting the high court's
consideration.

State Attorney General Mike Fisher's office is reviewing the court opinion,
considering whether there should be changes in the way drug agents do business.

"We will make appropriate modifications to our ongoing interdiction efforts
to adhere to that opinion," Fisher spokesman Kevin Harley said yesterday.

Police target interstate buses, figuring that they're an easy ride for drug
couriers hunting camouflage in a crowd.

But the Supreme Court ruling -- in Commonwealth vs. Belisario Polo, filed
Monday -- says that simply boarding a bus and trying to ferret out drug
carriers violates Article 1, Section 8 of the state Constitution,
protecting people from searches carried out without probable cause or
well-defined search warrants.

Justice Stephen Zappala quoted the court's opinion in a 1996 case,
Commonwealth vs. Matos, stating that "the seriousness of criminal activity
under investigation, whether it is the sale of drugs or the commission of a
violent crime, can never be used as justification for ignoring or
abandoning the constitutional right ... to be free from intrusions upon ...
personal liberty absent probable cause."

"The court's saying, 'We appreciate that drugs are a big problem, but we
will not allow an ends-justifies-the-means approach,' " said Jeffrey
Velander, a Stroudsburg, Monroe County, attorney with a bus search case on
appeal. "Follow the law, and if, at the end of the road, there's a
conviction, that's fine. You followed the law."

The bus stops pit police, who say they are simply trying to knot a likely
drug artery, against defense lawyers, who argue that drug agents have no
cause for the searches, use profiles to single out suspects and intimidate
them into allowing searches or providing incriminating information.

One of those cases on appeal began in June 1996 at the Post House bus stop
in Breezewood, where state drug agents said they found Greyhound passenger
Farion Holt packing $250,000 in marijuana and cocaine.

Drug agents said they had no reason to suspect any of the passengers of
carrying drugs. But they started focusing on Holt, they testified at court
hearings, when he kept eyeing them nervously.

The suspicion grew, they said, when they found him carrying a bus ticket
made out in another man's name and discovered he was making a 44-hour round
trip from Indianapolis to New York City, with only an eight-hour layover in
New York -- a short stopover that fits investigators' profile for drug runners.

In recent months, Pittsburgh defense lawyer Thomas Crawford persuaded a
Bedford County judge to throw out evidence against one client charged at
the Breezewood bus stop after police used dogs to sniff for drugs in a
random search of the bus he was riding.

"The search was terrible," Crawford said.

"The minute I can't use the marijuana they found, I have no case," Bedford
County District Attorney Dwight Diehl said.

In another case that Crawford said yesterday was ripe for appeal, a client
instead opted for a plea agreement and a one-to two-year jail sentence.

"He didn't want to roll the dice," Crawford said.