SUPREME COURT TO HEAR SEARCH-AND-SEIZURE, IMMIGRATION CASES

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court added a dozen new cases to its docket
for its new term, examining issues of criminal law, immigration law and
free speech -- and whether disabled golfer Casey Martin has a right to
ride in a golf cart at tournaments.

In the Martin case, culled from the hundreds of appeals that
accumulated over the summer recess, the justices said Tuesday that they
would hear arguments that the federal Americans With Disabilities Act
does not apply to Professional Golfers' Association Tour events.

A federal appeals court ruled last spring that the act requires the PGA
Tour to waive its requirement that players walk the course during
tournaments.

Martin has a circulatory disorder in his right leg that makes it
painful to walk long distances. He sued the PGA Tour in 1997, citing a
provision of the ADA that bans discrimination in places of ``public
accommodation.'' The definition of public accommodation includes
recreational places such as golf courses.

The new court session will be an unusually important term for another
area of law, the Fourth Amendment's search-and-seizure principles,
already the subject of three cases the justices scheduled for argument
during the coming weeks. The new case raises the question of whether
the use by police of a heat-sensing device to detect patterns inside a
home is a ``search'' that requires a warrant.

Because high-intensity lights are often used for cultivating marijuana
plants indoors, thermal imagers, which detect heat patterns, are
increasingly popular police tools for detecting marijuana-growing
operations. Defendants often challenge the use of the device as an
unconstitutional search, and the lower courts have reached conflicting
results.

In the case accepted Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in
San Francisco had affirmed the conviction of an Oregon man for growing
marijuana in his home. A heat pattern was detected by a device,
enabling police to then obtain a warrant to search Danny Lee Kyllo's
house. The house was not randomly chosen for surveillance; Kyllo's wife
had been arrested on a drug charge, and the police suspected that the
couple were part of a conspiracy to grow and distribute marijuana in
the area.

Kyllo said in his Supreme Court appeal that his case ``raises the
fundamental question of whether the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of
personal security in one's home must yield to scientific advances that
render our traditional barriers of privacy obsolete.''

In a Texas case, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether the
government can treat fathers and mothers differently in deciding
whether their children born out of wedlock and outside the country are
U.S. citizens.

The court will hear an appeal by a Texas man, born in Vietnam to an
American father and a Vietnamese mother, who was ordered deported to
Vietnam after being convicted of sexual assault. Tuan Ahn Nguyen, who
was born in 1969 and brought to the United States in 1975, contends he
is a U.S. citizen and cannot be deported.

Federal immigration law automatically gives citizenship to children
born abroad and out of wedlock if their mother is American, but
requires more if their father is American. Before the child reaches age
18, the father must acknowledge paternity and agree to support the
child.

In the free-speech case from Montana, the justices said they would
decide whether prison officials violate inmates' constitutional rights
when they forbid them to give legal advice to fellow inmates.