POLICE SEARCHING CAR MAY INCLUDE PASSENGER'S THINGS

WASHINGTON -- Police officers who have probable cause to search a car
for illegal drugs can search the personal belongings of passengers who
are themselves under no suspicion of illegal activity, the Supreme
Court ruled Monday in its latest decision expanding police authority
over motorists and their passengers.

The 6-3 decision overturned a ruling by the Supreme Court of Wyoming,
which held last year that a closed package belonging to a passenger
could not be included in a general search of a car and its contents
unless there was reason to suspect the passenger of a crime or the
driver of concealing evidence in the passenger's belongings.

The closed container in this case was a purse belonging to a passenger
in a car that police in Wyoming had stopped for speeding. When the
driver said that he used a hypodermic syringe, visible in his shirt
pocket, to administer drugs, police clearly had probable cause to
search the car.

Despite knowing that the purse belonged to the passenger, Sandra
Houghton, and not to the driver, police searched it as well, finding
methamphetamine and drug paraphernalia. The Wyoming Supreme Court
found the search unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, overturning
Ms. Houghton's conviction for drug possession.

In his majority opinion Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia said the
Wyoming court had incorrectly drawn a distinction, on the basis of
ownership, between containers that could be the subject of a
warrantless automobile search and those that could not. "Passengers,
no less than drivers, possess a reduced expectation of privacy with
regard to the property that they transport in cars," he said.

Scalia said that in balancing the "substantial" law enforcement
interests in a complete search against a passenger's reduced
expectation of privacy, the law enforcement side was clearly the
weightier. "A 'passenger's property' rule would dramatically reduce
the ability to find and seize contraband and evidence of crime," he
said.

The majority opinion was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and
by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and
Stephen Breyer, who wrote a concurring opinion. Justice John Paul
Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion that Justices David Souter and Ruth
Bader Ginsburg also signed.

The decision, Wyoming v. Houghton, No. 98-184, addressed an issue that
had remained in doubt since the Court ruled in 1982 that a search of a
lawfully stopped vehicle could include "every part of the vehicle and
its contents that may conceal the object of the search." That case,
United States v. Ross, did not involve a passenger, and courts have
disagreed since then on the ruling's implications for closed
containers that police actually knew or should have known did not
belong to the driver.

In barring the search of the passenger's property, the Wyoming Supreme
Court relied on a different Supreme Court precedent, a 1979 decision
that police could not search patrons in a bar simply on the basis of a

warrant to search the premises and the bartender.

"A person's mere propinquity to others independently suspected of
criminal activity does not, without more, give rise to probable cause
to search that person," the Court said then in Ybarra v. Illinois, a
decision from which then-Associate Justice Rehnquist had dissented.

In his opinion Monday, Scalia said the barroom precedent was
inapplicable because it involved "the unique, significantly heightened
protection afforded against searches of one's person." It remains the
case, after Monday's ruling, that police do not have the right to
search a passenger whom they do not suspect of wrongdoing.

In his dissenting opinion, Stevens said the majority had overstated
the law enforcement interests involved in the case. "Certainly the
ostensible clarity of the court's rule is attractive," Stevens said.
But he added, "A rule requiring a warrant or individualized probable
cause to search passenger belongings is every bit as simple as the
court's rule; it simply protects more privacy."

The following were among the other developments at the Court Monday:

Sentencing

The Court ruled that a person who pleaded guilty to a criminal charge
did not give up the right to remain silent at the sentencing hearing,
and further, that in imposing sentence, the judge could not penalize a
defendant for remaining silent.

The decision overturned a ruling by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of
Appeals, in Philadelphia, which held that by pleading guilty to
participating in a narcotics ring, a woman had waived her Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination at the sentencing hearing
that determined the amount of drugs involved, on which the sentence
was based.

All nine justices agreed that the woman, Amanda Mitchell, retained the
right to invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege. But the Court split 5-4
on whether the judge was justified in drawing adverse inferences from
her refusal to testify. Ms. Mitchell did not testify at her hearing,
and the judge sentenced her to 10 years after telling her, "I held it
against you."

Writing for the majority, Kennedy said that the judge's behavior
"imposed an impermissible burden on the exercise of the constitutional
right against compelled self-incrimination." In a dissenting opinion,
Scalia said the Fifth Amendment did not shield the defendant "from the
natural and appropriate consequences of her uncooperativeness at the
sentencing stage."

Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer joined the majority opinion,
Mitchell v. U.S., No. 97-7541. Rehnquist, along with O'Connor and
Thomas, joined the dissent.

Habeas Corpus

Accepting a death-penalty appeal from Virginia, the Court agreed to
resolve several important questions under the Antiterrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law that limited the
jurisdiction of the federal courts to review state-court convictions
and sentences by means of petitions for a writ of habeas corpus.

The case, Williams v. Taylor, No. 98-8384, raises the question of how
much discretion Congress left to the federal courts to reconsider
state court findings, particularly in the context of whether the
defendant received constitutionally adequate legal representation. The
case is an appeal from the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in
Richmond, Va., whose unusually strict interpretation of the 1996 law
has led it to approve death sentences rapidly and in growing numbers.

The defendant in this case, Terry Williams, convicted of a 1985
murder, was scheduled to die on Tuesday before the Supreme Court
issued a stay of execution last Friday.