A RARE VICTORY FOR THE RIGHT TO BE LEFT ALONE

Supreme Court justices generally put a high priority on safeguarding their
privacy, which is one reason why they adamantly refuse to let cameras show
what goes on in their courtroom. Once in a while, they also worry about
protecting your privacy--which may not be affected by TV cameras but is
threatened by much of what the Supreme Court has done in recent years.

The framers of the Constitution thought Americans should not be afflicted
by government intrusions unless they had broken the law. So in the Bill of
Rights, they included the 4th Amendment, which guaranteed "the right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against
unreasonable searches and seizures."

But that provision, as interpreted by the justices in recent years, has
come to resemble a block of Swiss cheese--defined mostly by the holes in
it. As a consequence, your right to go about your business free of official
snooping and interference has shrunken considerably.

In your car, even if you are scrupulously obeying all traffic laws, you can
be pulled over so a police officer can be satisfied that you're not drunk
or unlicensed. If you are a public school student, even one with a perfect
record of behavior, you may be compelled to pass through metal detectors,
submit to locker searches and take drug tests.

Police may rifle through garbage you put out for collection, fly
helicopters over your backyard to see what you're up to, or board a bus to
"ask" for "permission" to open your bags. If you're a passenger in a taxi
or a guest in someone's home, you may be searched by police even if they
have no reason to think you've committed a crime.

So the city of Indianapolis had good reason to think it could take the
intrusions a small step further. Expanding a weapon used in the battle
against drunk driving, it set up police roadblocks to stop every car
entering certain areas, with the hope of catching drug offenders.

Drivers were asked for licenses and registration papers by cops, who used
the opportunity to evaluate the driver for signs of impairment and to let a
drug-detecting dog give the vehicle a good sniff. Anyone stopped at one of
these checkpoints could expect to be detained for up to five minutes.

By law enforcement standards, the roadblocks were wildly successful.
Indianapolis police stopped 1,161 vehicles and made 104 arrests--meaning
that only 10 innocent people had to be hassled to catch one who might be
guilty of some offense. The drunk-driving roadblock previously upheld by
the Supreme Court, by contrast, netted only 1.6 percent of the motorists
who were stopped, for an innocent-to-guilty ratio of 63 to 1.

But the court, after making so many exceptions to the ban on unreasonable
searches and seizures, finally realized the exceptions were about to
swallow the rule. The stops they've approved in the past, the justices
said, were "administrative" ones whose chief purpose was to foster safety,
health or border control. By a 6-3 vote, the court said drug interdiction
roadblocks can't be allowed, because they're about catching and punishing
people who break drug laws.

"We have never approved a checkpoint whose primary purpose was to detect
evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing," declared Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor. If the court were to allow this type of stop, she continued,
"there would be little check on the ability of the authorities to construct
roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement purpose"--in which
case, "the 4th Amendment would do little to prevent such intrusions from
becoming a routine part of American life."

She's right. If police can pull over a motorist who's done nothing wrong to
check his car for drugs, why not stop drivers to check for evidence of
other criminal offenses? There are all sorts of bad guys who might be
apprehended for all sorts of crimes thanks to this useful tool. Dragnets
could be a daily feature of our lives.

Come to think of it, why stop only drivers? Why should pedestrians be
exempt? As 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner said when his
court invalidated the Indianapolis checkpoints, "Imagine if the government
set up a metal detector outside each person's home and required the person
to step through it whenever he entered or left, in order to determine
whether he was carrying a gun for which he lacked a permit."

Fortunately, police won't be doing things like that, thanks to this
decision reaffirming the basic purpose of the 4th Amendment. The average
person's constitutional sphere of privacy is smaller than it once was. But
at least "constitutional sphere of privacy" has not become a self-contradiction.