EROSION: COURT CHIPS AWAY RIGHTS

THE FOURTH Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches and
seizures. Generally, police must get court warrants to search a home.

But for 75 years, the Supreme Court has created numerous exceptions when
police targets are in vehicles.

Now the personal belongings of passengers are fair game when police officers
stop a vehicle because the driver may have done something wrong.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold a Wyoming drug
conviction, expanding the ever-growing police power to stop and search
vehicles without a warrant.

Back in 1982, the nation's highest court ruled that police could search
"every part and its contents" of a vehicle after stopping it for a lawful
reason, such as noticing a burned-out headlight or expired license plate.

But it remained unclear whether officers could search passengers' personal
belongings, such as a woman's purse, even if she was under no suspicion of
violating a law.

Justice Antonin Scalia's new opinion stated, "Passengers, no less than
drivers, possess a reduced expectation of privacy with regard to the
property that they transport in cars."

Without that authority, Scalia reasoned, police officers have a diminished
ability to fight crime.

Police officials praised the ruling, but defense lawyers condemned it. Lisa
Kemler of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers called it "an
abomination."

"You get in a car, and as a passenger, you basically have no rights," Kemler
said. "Almost anything goes, as long as police can come up with some reason
to say they expected to find evidence of a crime."

It is hard to draw lines between a community's desire for security and
individual rights to be protected from unreasonable searches.

This time, the court may have further eroded individual rights
unnecessarily.

In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that requiring police to
obtain search warrants for passengers would not impede effective law
enforcement.

Hilary Chiz, director of the West Virginia Civil Liberties Union, said the
court's ruling also shows a gender bias. The court held that a person's
belongings, but not the person, could be searched.

"Men tend to carry their personal effects in their wallets, while women tend
to carry them in bags," Chiz said. Under the ruling, a woman's purse could
be searched, but a man's wallet - secure in his back pocket - could not.

This latest ruling seems to be yet another example of the "drug exception"
to the Bill of Rights.

The court took yet another step to weaken the Bill of Rights to pursue the
"war on drugs." In the past, the court has given its imprimatur to seizure
of property without due process and even allowed sentences for some crimes
to be lengthened based on charges that defendants have been acquitted of.

Ironically, there is little or no evidence that the "war on drugs" will ever
be won, or that a victory would be worth the cost paid in civil liberties.