DRUG TESTS OF PREGNANT WOMEN RULED ILLEGAL SEARCH

Supreme Court: Results given to police violate Fourth Amendment

Washington-Reinforcing the Constitution's ban on unreasonable
searches, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a South Carolina
public hospital violated the rights of pregnant women when it gave
police their drug test results without their explicit permission.

The justices ruled 6-3 that while the intent of the testing program
was laudable-to prevent women from harming their fetuses by using
crack cocaine -it ran afoul of the Fourth Amendment's requirement that
consent or court-issued search warrants are necessary before test
information is shared with law enforcement authorities. Some of the
women who tested positive were arrested if they refused to enter a
drug treatment program. At least one woman was arrested in her
hospital bed after giving birth.

"It's a very, very important decision in protecting the right to
privacy of all Americans," said Priscilla Smith, a lawyer for the
Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, a nonprofit group that
represented the 10 women who brought the suit, seeking monetary
damages from the hospital. "It reaffirms that pregnant women have that
same right to a confidential relationship with their doctors."

"The court put public health ahead of drug enforcement," added Kevin
Zeese, president of Common Sense for Drug Policy, a nonprofit advocacy
group, who contended the Charleston program deterred poor pregnant
women from going to the clinic.

In the court's majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that
while the hospital's goal may have been to get women into drug
treatment programs and to protect their fetuses, "the immediate
objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law enforcement
purposes ..."

When hospitals gather evidence "for the specific purpose of
incriminating those patients, they have a special obligation to make
sure that the patients are fully informed about their constitutional
rights," Stevens said.

The justices sent the case back to a lower court to determine whether
the women, in signing the hospital's consent forms, had understood
that the results of the drug tests might be given to the police.

South Carolina Attorney General Charles Condon, who as a local
prosecutor in Charleston began the testing program, said, "There is no
right of a mother to jeopardize the health and safety of an unborn
child through her own drug abuse."

Condon developed the policy in 1989 with officials at the Medical
University of South Carolina, a Charleston hospital that treats
indigent patients. The women who tested positive for drugs after
submitting urine samples were subject to arrest under the state's
child-endangerment law.

Stevens' opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David
Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Anthony
Kennedy filed a separate opinion also concluding such tests are unlawful.

Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin
Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Writing for the three, Scalia said doctors
are supposed to have patients' welfare in mind, and "that they have in
mind in addition the provision of evidence to the police should make
no difference."

In previous cases, the high court has permitted drug testing without a
warrant or suspicion of individual wrongdoing when the government can
demonstrate a "special need"-such as preventing drug use by public
high school students or by railroad workers. But drug test results in
those cases weren't given to police.

"The invasion of privacy in this case is far more substantial than in
those cases," Stevens wrote, noting that patients normally expect
medical test results to be kept private.

In other opinions yesterday, the court:

Ruled 5-4 that employers can force workers to take job-related
disputes to arbitration rather than to court. The court's conservative
majority held that employers can use a 1925 federal law to enforce the
arbitration agreements many workers sign when they take jobs. The case
involved a gay former electronics salesman in California who sued his
employer, Circuit City Stores, charging harassment. While workers can
still challenge arbitration agreements, the ruling strengthens
employers' hands while giving employees fewer options to contend they
were treated unfairly.

Ruled 7-2 that state laws generally cannot divert a deceased person's
employee benefits to someone other than the designated beneficiary. In
overturning a Washington state law, the court ruled in favor of an
ex-wife of a man who died without removing her as the beneficiary of
his employer-provided insurance and pension. His children from a
previous marriage sued, saying they were entitled to the benefits. But
the opinion said a federal law, the Employee Retirement Income
Security Act, pre-empts state law.