COURT UPHOLDS RESTRICTIONS ON TRAVELER RIGHTS

Washington --- A divided Supreme Court, voicing new worry about the safety
of passengers on intercity buses, Monday reduced the privacy rights of
travelers by giving police and federal agents additional power to conduct
searches.

The 6-3 ruling, enhancing law enforcement authority in the war on drugs and
the war on terrorism, is likely to extend also to those who travel by
train, mass transit, and other forms of public transportation that officers
may want to search.

The Justice Department had urged the court to take into account the war on
terrorism in making its decision. ''In the current environment,'' the
department said, police and federal agents need authority to freely
approach individuals who ''travel on the nation's system of public
transportation.''

The court ruled that officers who board a bus to investigate do not have to
warn passengers beforehand about their rights to decline to submit to
pat-down searches or inspections of the contents of their luggage.

If the officers ask, in ''a polite, quiet voice'' and do not ''brandish a
weapon,'' they may seek passengers' consent to search either their bodies
or their belongings, the court said in an opinion written by Justice
Anthony Kennedy.

In that situation, the court said, passengers are not being
unconstitutionally coerced into giving the officers consent to search.

In this particular incident, Kennedy wrote, ''The officers gave the
passengers no reason to believe that they were required to answer the
officers' questions'' and nothing police said would bar anyone from getting
up and leaving the bus.

`Bus passengers, the opinion said, would be inclined to cooperate with
officers because they ''know that their participation enhances their own
safety and the safety of those around them.''

The court cast no doubt on the right of passengers to refuse to cooperate.
The issue in the case was whether any passenger would feel free to exercise
that right in the confines of a bus.

The ruling threw out a lower court decision declaring that, when officers
board a stopped bus to check out the passengers, they must make it clear to
passengers that they are free to refuse to cooperate and can get off the
bus anytime they wish --- a warning similar to the Miranda warnings that
police must give suspects before questioning them. Those warnings inform
suspects of their rights to remain silent and have a lawyer represent them.

The court's 12-page opinion came in a case involving a single bus search in
Tallahassee, but the broad wording of the opinion made it clear that the
decision would probably affect railroad and other forms of ground
transportation as well.

Counsel to mass transit systems could advise their police forces that such
searches are permissible under the ruling. That broader interpretation
could be challenged in federal courts.

Airline passengers already are subject to extensive searches to assure the
safety of that mode of travel.

Josh Dratel, an official of the National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers, which filed a brief in the case, said that ''any captive audience
is essentially fair game under this ruling.''

The dissenting justices, in an opinion written by Justice David Souter,
said the majority underestimated the degree to which passengers would feel
they had to comply with officers' requests.

In the Tallahassee bus encounter, the dissenters said, three officers took
control of the entire passenger compartment, and acted in a way that
indicated that the sweep of the bus was ''one the police would carry out
whatever the circumstances.''

The case involved two men who were traveling on a Greyhound bus from Fort
Lauderdale, Fla., to Detroit. When the bus made a scheduled stop in
Tallahassee, three officers boarded it for a routine drug sweep.

After asking the two men, Christopher Drayton and Clifton Brown Jr., who
were traveling together, for permission to search their luggage, the
officer found nothing suspicious.

Then the officer asked, and was apparently given permission, to do a
pat-down search.

He detected large bags on the inside of each of the men's pants legs. The
bags turned out to contain cocaine.

Drayton and Brown were convicted of narcotics violations. Drayton was
sentenced to 120 months in prison, and Brown to 88 months.

They won their challenge to the officers' conduct in a federal appeals court.

Joining Justice Kennedy's majority opinion were Chief Justice William
Rehnquist and Justices StephenBreyer, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia,
and Clarence Thomas.

Joining Souter in dissent were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul
Stevens.