BAD RULING ENDANGERS LIBERTIES

The Supreme Court's recent decision permitting misdemeanor arrests
without a warrant is among the scarier to emerge.

Nearly every American needs to take notice of the 5-4 ruling that
resulted from the jailing of a soccer mom, lest they become similar
victims of extraordinarily bad judgment - if not worse -on the part of
local police. The court, in essence, said that anyone can be stopped
for a minor infraction - from an illegal left turn to littering - and
be summarily arrested, searched and hauled off to jail in shackles.

The discretion this gives often poorly trained, underpaid and
sometimes corrupt police officers is astounding.

If that seems a bit overstated, look at the case that produced this
decision.

Soccer Mom Jailed

Gail Atwater, a young mother, picked up her children after soccer
practice and was driving them home when she was stopped by a Lago
Vista, Texas, police officer. She was ordered from her pickup truck on
a seat-belt violation, handcuffed in front of the small children and
driven to jail. It was, to paraphrase Justice David Souter who wrote
the majority opinion, a humiliating experience.

Atwater pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor and paid a $50 fine. Then
she and her husband, Dr. Michael Haas, sued the county, ultimately
producing the court's very bad ruling.

The officer certainly was correct to stop Atwater to insist that she
buckle up herself and the youngsters and, for that matter, to give her
a ticket for not having done so and a warning about a second
violation. But this policeman displayed what even Souter acknowledged
was "extremely poor judgment."

Nevertheless, the justice, who normally votes with the court's liberal
minority, said that while all this was embarrassing and inconvenient
to Atwater, it wasn't so bad as to violate the Fourth Amendment ban on
unreasonable search and seizure. Souter, joined by Chief Justice
William Rehnquist and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and
Clarence Thomas, said that the court didn't want to turn every
discretionary decision by police in the field into a constitutional
question.

Bad Decision In Cincinnati

Police failure to pass the judgment test has been demonstrated again
and again recently, from clear evidence of racial profiling to the
shooting death of an unarmed African-American man that set off riots
in Cincinnati. He had been wanted only for traffic violations.

But increasing public vulnerability to poor police procedures is not
the only serious problem with this ruling. Because the courts already
had established the right of police to conduct searches once an arrest
is made, it gives officers new license to stop anyone on any minor
pretext and conduct a fishing expedition to find something more
serious or merely to harass them. The pre-civil-rights days in the
South were notorious for this.

The potential for abuse in this practice is enormous and legal
scholars from the liberal end of the spectrum to the conservative have
been expressing concern.

The vast majority of law officers are responsible and honest, and one
hopes that recent history has made their superiors more sensitive to
the need for improved training and supervision. One bad call, however,
can lead to horrendous consequences, as was true in Cincinnati.

The court has made it easier for a broken taillight or a failure to
make a turn signal or any of a dozen other minor infractions to become
an excuse for something far more sinister. Eliminating the practice of
racial profiling will become more difficult under the court ruling.

Most Americans are law-abiding, but they do make mistakes. That's why
the law recognizes that some infractions are greater than others and
require other measures. The court has blurred that distinction. Lago
Vista authorities conceded that they aren't in the business of
arresting mothers who are picking up their children. But that's
exactly what they did, and because they did, all Americans are a lot
more at the mercy of bad judgment or something worse.