COURT LOOKS AT EXPANSION OF CHECKPOINTS FOR DRUGS

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - A decade after upholding the use of roadblocks to
catch drunken drivers, the Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether
adding a drug-sniffing dog to the checkpoint renders the practice
unconstitutional.

The justices accepted an appeal from the City of Indianapolis, where the
use of drug-detection roadblocks was declared unconstitutional last year by
a federal appeals court. Courts around the country have differed on the
legality of this increasingly popular law-enforcement technique.

In this case, Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for the United States Court
of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, said that in contrast to
the safety rationale that justified the sobriety checkpoints, the
drug-detection roadblocks appeared to be little more than "a pretext for a
dragnet search for criminals."

Judge Posner said the Indianapolis program "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.

Indianapolis set up the drug roadblocks six times in 1998, stopping 1,161
cars and making 55 arrests for transporting narcotics as well as 49 arrests
for other misconduct. The program was challenged in a class-action lawsuit
brought by the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.

In its Supreme Court appeal, Indianapolis v. Edmond, No. 99-1030, the city
is arguing that the relatively high number of arrests demonstrates the
program's usefulness as well as the dimension of the drug problem it was
designed to attack.

The city noted that the Supreme Court had ruled in 1983 that a "canine
sniff" by a trained drug-detecting dog involves such a minimal intrusion
that it is not a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, which bars
unreasonable search and seizure. Consequently, the city is arguing, adding
this element to a lawful roadblock could not logically result in a Fourth
Amendment violation.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 1990 case, Michigan v. Sitz, that a sobriety
checkpoint, while constituting a seizure, was not unreasonable because the
interest in public safety outweighed the minimal intrusion on a driver's
time and privacy.

In his opinion for the appeals court panel, in which he was joined by Judge
Diane P. Wood, Judge Posner said the Michigan case stood for the principle
that the general rule requiring the police to have a specific basis for
stopping someone could be relaxed for a purpose other than crime detection,
like public safety. "Catching crooks" was not such a purpose, he said.

Dissenting in the 2-to-1 decision, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook said state
and local governments should have the flexibility to choose the
law-enforcement methods they preferred. "The real threat to civil liberties
comes from the national government, not from law-enforcement variations
that can be avoided by driving a few miles to the east or west," he said.

As the justices returned today from a mid-winter recess, they disposed of
hundreds of cases. Because the argument calendar for the current term is
now full, the cases granted today and for the next four months will be
argued after the new term begins next October.