COURT SAYS RACE APPROPRIATE IN STOP

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Border Patrol agents can consider ethnicity when they
make traffic stops, according to a federal court ruling in a case involving
two Hispanic men who turned their cars around to avoid a checkpoint.

In a 2-1 ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld
the detention of the men stopped 50 miles inside the United States after
they tried to avoid a highway checkpoint.

The court said it was appropriate that among the things the officers
considered in making the stop was the fact that the men were Hispanic.

Authorities stopped the men after a motorist said that two cars with Mexican
plates turned around a mile from the checkpoint.

Agents searched the cars of German Espinoza Montero-Camargo and Lorenzo
Sanchez-Guillen and found two large bags of marijuana and a .32-caliber pistol.

This week's ruling upheld Montero-Camargo's guilty plea to conspiracy to
possess marijuana with intent to distribute and Sanchez-Guillen's conviction
on the same charge and for being an illegal alien possessing ammunition.

In a dissent, Judge Alex Kozinski wrote that "none of the `numerous other
factors' cited by the majority justify the stop." He cited a 1994 case in
which the same court ruled that reasonable suspicion can't be based on broad
profiles that cast suspicion on entire categories of people.