SUPREME COURT PUTS BRAKES ON DRUG ROADBLOCKS

Court Says 'no' To Stopping Innocent People

The U.S. Supreme Court said Tuesday that there is after all a limit to how
far the government can stretch the Bill of Rights in its "War on Drugs."
That is good news to anyone who values personal freedom.

In a 6-3 decision, the court ruled that police in Indianapolis went too far
in using roadblocks to check for drugs. Public safety is one thing, it
said, but roadblocks are not a routine law enforcement tool.

Indianapolis conducted six roadblocks aimed at catching drug criminals in
1998. Police stopped 1,161 cars and trucks and checked them with
drug-sniffing dogs. All in all, they made 104 arrests, more than half of
which were for drugs.

The court had previously upheld the use of roadblocks as border checks or
to curtail drunken driving. That those are acceptable was reaffirmed in
Tuesday's ruling.

Writing for the majority, however, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said that
the idea that the public benefits of roadblocks outweighs the inconvenience
only goes so far.

"If this case were to rest on such a high level of generality," wrote
O'Connor, "there would be little check on the authorities' ability to
construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement purpose."

The Indianapolis police said that the idea behind the roadblocks was to
prosecute drug crimes. But law enforcement alone, said the court, is not
sufficient reason to stop and search innocent people.

"While we do not limit the purposes that may justify a checkpoint program
to any rigid set of categories," says the majority opinion, "we decline to
approve a program whose primary purpose is ultimately indistinguishable
from the general interest of crime control."

In dissent, Chief Justice William Rehnquist pretty much made the majority's
case. Rehnquist said he disagreed "because these seizures serve the state's
accepted and significant interests of preventing drunken driving, and
checking for driver's licenses and registrations."

Roadblocks to check your papers? That would be dismissed as a cliche of
B-movie Nazis ­ except that the chief justice of the United States thinks
it is acceptable.

Would this opinion apply to the drug checkpoint local law enforcement
agencies conducted in June along Colorado Highway 145 near Rico? It would
seem so, but that would be for the courts to decide.

What counts is that the court has said that Americans are not fish to be
hauled in and sorted at the government's whim. That is a welcome reaffirmation.