COURT LOOSENS CAR SEARCH RULES

Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON -- In a decision that continues the trend of giving police
greater authority to search motorists and their cars, the Supreme Court on
Monday swept aside the distinction between motorists and their passengers.

A police officer who stops a car and has reason to suspect it contains
illegal drugs or guns may search everything in the vehicle, including a
passenger's belongings, the justices ruled on a 6-3 vote.

"We hold that police officers with probable cause to search a car may
inspect passengers' belongings found in the car that are capable of
concealing the object of the search," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the
court.

Defense lawyers said they were outraged.

"We're becoming a police state. This ruling tells the police that when they
pull over a car to investigate a driver, they can search any one of us in
the vehicle for any reason or no reason whatsoever," said Denver attorney
Larry S. Pozner, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers.

But Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police
Organizations, praised the court "for giving officers the tools they need to
do their jobs. Officers must be free of unreasonable, confusing and
unworkable restrictions on what may be searched."

Legal experts who have tracked the court's cases on car searches said the
ruling was more of a clarification than a bold departure. The scope of
police power to search inside a stopped car has been fought out in a series
of cases over the past 20 years.

"All these decisions basically say that once you get in your car, you are
fair game," said Boston University Law Professor Tracey Maclin. But Monday's
ruling "is significant," he added, "because it affects potentially millions
of people."

For decades, the court has said that once people leave home and go onto the
highways, they have a diminished right to privacy. To maintain safety on the
roads, police have nearly unchecked power to stop and question motorists,
the court has said.

The officer needs something beyond a mere traffic violation to justify a
full-fledged search of the car, the court has said.

If, for example, the motorist appears to be drunk or on drugs, or is
believed to be carrying a concealed weapon, the officer can search "every
part of the vehicle and its contents," the court has said in the past.

Until Monday, however, it had been unclear whether this power to search
widely extended to the personal belongings of a presumably innocent
passenger.

The issue came before the court when state judges in Wyoming threw out the
drug evidence found in the purse of Sandra Houghton, a passenger in a car
driven by a man who had syringe sticking out of his front pocket. This
search violated the 4th Amendment, the Wyoming Supreme Court said, because
police had no reason to suspect the passenger of wrongdoing.

Monday's ruling reversed that decision.

It would be confusing for the police and for local judges, Scalia said, if a
national rule were set that allowed searches of some containers in cars, but
not others, depending who claimed them. "One would expect
passenger-confederates to claim everything as their own," he said, prompting
a "bog of litigation" to resolve whether the officers acted correctly.