CHECKPOINTS TARGETING DRUGS RULED UNCONSTITUTIONAL

Court Limits Purpose Of Police Roadblocks

WASHINGTON -- Police roadblocks aimed at discovering drugs violate the
Constitution, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday in a decision reaffirming
the Fourth Amendment prohibition against searches and seizures that are not
based on a suspicion of individual wrongdoing.

"Without drawing the line at roadblocks designed primarily to serve the
general interest in crime control, the Fourth Amendment would do little to
prevent such intrusions from becoming a routine part of American life,"
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the 6-3 majority.

The dissenters were Chief Justice William Rehnquist along with Justices
Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The majority agreed with a ruling last year by the federal appeals court in
Chicago, holding that the city of Indianapolis violated the Fourth
Amendment rights of motorists whom the police stopped at drug-interdiction
checkpoints that were set up on city streets six times in 1998.

Pulling over cars in sequence, the police would check a driver's license
and registration and then walk a specially trained dog around the car to
sniff for drugs. The police stopped more than 1,100 cars and made more than
100 arrests. More than half were for drug-related crimes, and the rest were
for license problems or other offenses.

The Indianapolis case was closely watched by cities and law enforcement
agencies around the country. The National League of Cities told the Supreme
Court in a brief that other cities were ready to adopt the Indianapolis
program if the court upheld it.

In a case from Michigan 10 years ago, the Supreme Court upheld sobriety
checkpoints as a means of protecting public safety by getting drunken
drivers off the road. The court had also ruled in the past that a sniff by
a drug-detecting dog, which is commonly used at airports, is so minimally
intrusive as not to constitute a search.

Taking those precedents together, Indianapolis argued that adding a
drug-sniffing dog to a checkpoint could not convert a lawful police
practice into one that was unconstitutional.

However, O'Connor said the purpose of the checkpoint made all the
difference: While sobriety checkpoints served to protect the public from an
"immediate, vehicle-bound threat to life and limb," she said, roadblocks
for drug detection primarily served the ordinary law-enforcement interest
in crime control.

In his dissenting opinion, Rehnquist said that because the Indianapolis
checkpoints could be used validly to check for alcohol use or license
irregularities, it was "constitutionally irrelevant" that the city "also
hoped to interdict drugs."

Indianapolis had argued that the severity of the drug problem justified the
roadblocks. Granting that drugs create "social harms of the first
magnitude," O'Connor said, "the gravity of the threat alone" was not
sufficient to justify dispensing with individual suspicion.

O'Connor said that only in "limited circumstances" had the court been
willing to set aside the requirement of individual suspicion. The examples
she offered included drug-testing of customs agents, transportation workers
and student athletes, which the court's precedents have justified as
serving "special needs, beyond the normal need for law enforcement."

Kenneth J. Falk, who brought the case against Indianapolis as legal
director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Indiana affiliate, and who
argued the case last month, said yesterday that the decision was an
important reaffirmation of the Fourth Amendment principle that "the police
cannot conduct a criminal investigation without cause."