HIGH COURT TO DECIDE ON STOP-AND-SEARCH

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether police
generally may stop and question someone who runs away after seeing them.

The court said it will review an Illinois ruling that barred police most
often from making such investigative stops, despite arguments by state
prosecutors that they are justified in high-crime neighborhoods.

Sam Wardlow was convicted of a weapons violation after he was arrested on a
Chicago street in 1995 while carrying a loaded handgun in a bag.

Police officers in a patrol car had seen Wardlow spot them and take off
running. They pursued and eventually cornered him, and found the gun after
a patdown search.

Wardlow challenged his conviction for unlawful use of a weapon by a felon
and the two-year prison sentence it carried. He said he had been subjected
to an unlawful stop.

His appeal raised the issue of whether his running away from police was
enough to create a ``reasonable suspicion'' to justify the stop and patdown
search.

A state appeals court threw out his conviction, and the Illinois Supreme
Court upheld that decision last September after ruling that ``such flight
alone is insufficient to create a reasonable suspicion of involvement in
criminal conduct.''

Police had acted on ``nothing more than a hunch,'' the state's highest
court said, and in so doing violated Wardlow's constitutional protection
against unreasonable searches and seizures.

Most courts that have studied the issue have agreed with the Illinois court
that such police tactics are unlawful. State courts in Alaska, California,
Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey and Utah have
said so.

But state courts in Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, North
Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin have ruled that fleeing from police does
create a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct and justifies a police stop.

Federal courts also have split on the issue.

Illinois' appeal urged the justices ``to give needed guidance to lower
courts and law enforcement officials throughout the nation.''

The case is Illinois vs. Wardlow, 98-1036.