HIGH COURT CASTS DOUBT ON SEARCHES AT BUS STOPS

BEDFORD, Pa. -- Smalltime boxer Mark Anthony Turner could have been in
Bedford County Jail today, marking his second day of a one-to two-year
stint for carrying a brick of cocaine in his briefcase.

Instead, he's waiting to withdraw his guilty plea -- and probably to watch
drug charges being dropped, his lawyer said -- thanks to a state Supreme
Court decision that puts police on shakier ground when they use the proven
tactic of boarding commercial buses and trying to ferret out drug carriers
among the passengers.

"They probably ought not to do that," said Thomas Crawford, a Pittsburgh
attorney representing Turner. "People are citizens. You can't just board a
bus and say, 'Stop, identify your luggage. Sieg heil!' "

The Supreme Court ruling doesn't name Turner.

It's about Dorothy Cooke, a New York City woman who was caught aboard a bus
at a suburban Philadelphia bus stop in January 1998. In her purse was a
pound of cocaine.

The Montgomery County public defender's office fought the county district
attorney, convincing the Supreme Court that Cooke was detained improperly
when police boarded the bus, questioned passengers and focused on her
during what was supposed to be a random hunt for drugs.

But the decision -- filed Dec. 5, two weeks before Turner was to be
sentenced -- mirrors the Turner case and similar searches at a bus stop in
Breezewood, a heavily traveled Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange in eastern
Bedford County.

There, just after midnight on Oct. 21, 1999, state police boarded a
Greyhound bus at the Post House, a popular bus stopover, and wound up
arresting Turner, 30, of New Albany, Ind., for drug possession and
possession with intent to deliver.

It was one of three buses police boarded at random that night, troopers
testified at a hearing a week later. They followed their practiced routine,
asking passengers to pair up with their luggage, then fishing an unclaimed
briefcase from an overhead luggage rack, declaring it abandoned and opening it.

Inside, police found a 2.2-pound brick of cocaine, wrapped in duct tape.
They identified the bag as Turner's when they found a cell phone carrier
that matched his phone, a motel key, and later, DNA from a toothbrush found
in the briefcase.

"The procedure was more akin to a border search in Nazi Germany than to a
public bus rest stop encounter between citizens and the police," Crawford
complained in a court brief last year, asking to have the evidence suppressed.

But Bedford County Judge Daniel Howsare disagreed, saying police were not
threatening, that nobody was being detained, and that state law classified
the briefcase as abandoned and allowed police to search it.

Turner responded by pleading guilty to possession with intent to deliver
under a deal that was supposed to get him one to two years in the county jail.

But before he could appear for sentencing Monday, Crawford asked Howsare to
delay the proceedings to give everybody a chance to digest the Cooke
decision, a one-page order accompanied by a two-page statement of dissent
from Justices Thomas Saylor and Ronald Castille Jr.

Kevin Harley, a spokesman for state Attorney General Mike Fisher, said that
Fisher would review the Cooke decision "and make appropriate changes" to
police procedure during bus stop drug searches.

Howsare expects to take up the matter again Jan. 18, likely deciding then
if the evidence -- the linchpin in the prosecution's case -- will be tossed out.