HIGH COURT TO RULE ON POLICE USE OF DRUG-DETECTION ROADBLOCKS

Narcotics-Sniffing Dogs At Traffic Checkpoints Challenged In Indiana

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court, confronting a new tactic in the war on
drugs, agreed yesterday to rule on the constitutionality of police
roadblocks as a technique for finding cars that are carrying narcotics.

At issue is the Indianapolis Police Department's policy of making random
stops at a roadblock to check for traffic violations and at the same time
using drug-sniffing dogs to check on cars and their occupants.

A federal appeals court struck down the policy in July, saying it was not
designed to protect highway safety, a purpose that would have made the
roadblocks legal. Rather, that court said, it was used as "a pretext for a
dragnet search for criminals."

In that ruling, Judge Richard Posner, writing for the 7th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, in Chicago, said the Indianapolis strategy "belongs to
the genre of general programs of surveillance which invade privacy
wholesale in order to discover evidence of crime," amounting to an
unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment.

Other lower courts disagree about the constitutionality of drug roadblocks,
so the justices stepped in to resolve the controversy.

The Supreme Court in 1990 upheld drunken-driving roadblocks as a method of
removing hazardous drivers from the roads.

[snip]