JUSTICES WEIGH IF CASH HIDDEN IS CASH LAUNDERED

WASHINGTON -- In colloquial terms, "money laundering" means cleaning
"dirty" money -- the proceeds of a drug transaction, for example --
by using it in a way that hides its origins and gives it the
appearance of legitimate wealth.

The Supreme Court is not known for its bent for the colloquial, but a
majority of the justices appeared ready to insist on this definition,
as a matter of statutory interpretation, during an argument on Monday
on the scope of the federal Money Laundering Control Act.

That presented an obvious problem for the government, which
interprets the law a good deal more broadly, applying it in this case
to the activity of a courier who hid $83,000 in cash under the
floorboard of his car as he headed for the Texas border with Mexico.

According to the government, that act of concealment, as part of a
plan to take the money out of the country, was exactly what Congress
had in mind when it passed the act in 1986. The federal appeals court
in New Orleans agreed, upholding the money-laundering conviction of a
Mexican man, Humberto F. R. Cuellar, who was stopped on a Texas
highway for driving substantially under the speed limit. The police
officers began searching the car after they smelled marijuana on the
roll of bills that Mr. Cuellar took out of his pocket.

The justices on Monday appeared unpersuaded by the breadth of the
government's argument, wondering why its interpretation of the
statute might not make a criminal out of someone who walked across
the border with a few dollars tucked into a shoe.

"I don't know why they call this statute 'Laundering of Monetary
Instruments,' " Justice Stephen G. Breyer, referring to the set of
provisions at issue. "Why didn't they call it 'shoe hiding'?"

And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed, "On the government's
theory, anyone who transports hidden money to get it out of the
country, who drives the car, just the driver, is a money launderer."

An assistant to the solicitor general, Lisa H. Schertler, replied,
"No matter how you see it, this was precisely the conduct that
Congress was getting at."

The law makes it a crime to take the proceeds of "some form of
unlawful activity" out of the country while concealing or disguising
any of five of the proceeds' "attributes." These are the money's
"nature," location, source, ownership or control.

Mr. Cuellar's lawyer, Jerry V. Beard, urged the justices to interpret
the word "conceal" in context, to mean some activity other than
simply hiding cash. "The statute does not criminalize concealing
money's existence," Mr. Beard said. He added that while his client
"may have in fact concealed money itself, he did not conceal the
'nature, source, location, ownership or control' of the unlawful proceeds."

"Well, he certainly concealed the location," Chief Justice John G.
Roberts Jr. said.

"All money changes location," Mr. Beard replied, adding that the
government's position "would effectively render all transportation of
funds necessarily to be money laundering." By contrast, he said, the
crime of money laundering requires the effort to "minimize the
criminal taint of unlawful proceeds" by making them appear legitimate.

Although the chief justice's initial questions during the argument
suggested that he supported the government, he later appeared to
share the mounting skepticism of his colleagues. When Ms. Schertler
said that putting money in a suitcase in a car's trunk might be
evidence of a "design to conceal," Chief Justice Roberts said: "When
I use a suitcase, I'm using it to carry my clothes, not to conceal them."

Justice John Paul Stevens told Ms. Schertler that the government's
position in the case, Cuellar v. United States, No. 06-1456, seemed
to make the concept of money laundering, as such, irrelevant. "Is
this just a total wild goose chase?" the justice asked.

The statute is a powerful prosecutorial weapon that carries a
sentence of up to 20 years and fines of $500,000 or more. In 2006, it
accounted for nearly 1,000 convictions. Another law, which requires
reporting the transportation of more than $10,000 in cash across the
border, carries much lighter sentences and is not often useful in the
case of drug couriers, because it requires proof that the defendant
knew the law's requirements and was deliberately violating them.

In another development on Monday, the court accepted an appeal from
the State of Arizona on whether the police need a warrant to search a
car after arresting the driver and any passengers and removing them
from the car's vicinity.

Over the years, the Supreme Court has ruled on so many permutations
of automobile searches that it might have seemed safe to assume that
all possible questions had been answered. But the one presented by
this case, Arizona v. Gant, No. 07-542, evidently has not been.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled that once a car's occupants had been
arrested and secured, presenting no threat to officers on the scene,
there were no "exigent circumstances" to justify a search without
warrants, and that the Fourth Amendment required a warrant.

Arizona is arguing that its Supreme Court places too great a burden
on the police by underestimating the threat to their safety and
requiring them to make detailed assessments of different
circumstances. Instead, the state argues, there should be a
"bright-line rule" that permitted searches without warrants of cars
whose occupants had just been arrested.