COURT RULES ON POLICE SEARCHES OF MOTORISTS

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that in evaluating
whether "reasonable suspicion" existed for a police officer to detain a
suspect briefly for questioning, courts should pay more attention to the
officer's experience and the event's overall context than to possibly
innocent explanations for individual parts of the incident.

The case concerned a federal border patrol agent's stop of a minivan
carrying two adults and three children on an unpaved road in a remote area
of southern Arizona. The vehicle was found to be carrying 128 pounds of
marijuana, but the federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that the
stop was unconstitutional.

The appeals court broke down the incident's narrative into 10 separate
components, like the fact that the minivan's driver slowed abruptly when he
saw the border patrol car, avoiding eye contact with the agent, and the
fact that the children in the back seat waved at the agent in an oddly
mechanical manner, as if they had been instructed to do so.

"Singly and collectively," these events were either irrelevant or innocuous
and were "insufficient to give rise to reasonable suspicion," the United
States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit said in granting the motion
filed by the driver, Ralph Arvizu, to suppress the evidence.

In his opinion today, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist referred to the
appeals court's assessment of the individual factors as a
"divide-and-conquer analysis" and said it was inconsistent with the Supreme
Court's insistence in its precedents that reasonable suspicion be based on
a "totality of the circumstances."

The chief justice said the border patrol agent, Clinton Stoddard, "was
entitled to make an assessment of the situation in light of his specialized
training and familiarity with the customs of the area's inhabitants."

He continued, "We think it quite reasonable that a driver's slowing down,
stiffening of posture, and failure to acknowledge a sighted law enforcement
officer might well be unremarkable in one instance (such as a busy San
Francisco highway) while quite unusual in another (such as a remote portion
of rural southeastern Arizona)." The dirt road some 30 miles north of the
Mexican border is commonly used by smugglers of aliens and narcotics who
want to avoid a checkpoint on the parallel paved highway.

Chief Justice Rehnquist said that while police officers should base their
actions on more than a "hunch," he said the officer does not have to
exclude the possibility that an innocent explanation exists for the conduct.

The court accepted the government's appeal, United States v. Arvizu, No.
00-1519, last June, and briefs were filed before the events of Sept. 11
brought new significance to the question of the government's investigatory
authority when it has some basis for suspicion that does not meet the
strict test of probable cause that is necessary for a search or arrest warrant.

When the case was argued in November, it was evident that recent events
were on the minds of at least some justices. "We live in a perhaps a more
dangerous age today than we did when this event took place," Justice Sandra
Day O'Connor said then of Mr. Arvizu's arrest, which took place in 1998.

Addressing Victoria A. Brambl, an assistant federal public defender from
Tucson who was representing Mr. Arvizu, Justice O'Connor asked: "Are we
going to back off from 'totality of the circumstances' in an era when it
may become very important to us to have that as the overall test?" She
continued, "I'm concerned that the Ninth Circuit opinion seemed to be a
little more rigid than our precedents require or that common sense would
dictate today."

Lawrence S. Lustberg, a lawyer from Newark who filed a brief for Mr. Arvizu
on behalf of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the
decision amounted to the justices telling the lower courts that "you can't
define totality of the circumstances and we're not going to." The decision
"essentially immunizes police judgment from review without giving the
courts any standard to go on," Mr. Lustberg said in an interview.