JUSTICES EXPAND POLICE POWER IN CAR SEARCHES

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 purse, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

The 6-3 decision continues the trend of giving police greater
authority to search motorists and their cars.

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.

But 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.

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 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 a passenger in a car driven by
a man who had a syringe sticking out of his front pocket. This search
violated the Fourth Amendment, the Wyoming Supreme Court said,
because police had no reason to suspect the passenger of wrongdoing.

Reversing that decision, the Supreme Court swept aside the distinction
between motorists and their passengers.

"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," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia for
the court.

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.

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."

The case involved a traffic stop in which the motorist, David Young,
had a hypodermic syringe sticking out of his shirt pocket.

The officer asked why he had the syringe. "With refreshing candor,
Young replied he had used it to take drugs," Scalia wrote.

That in turn prompted the officers to search his car and his two
passengers, including Sandra Houghton. She had a syringe and
methamphetamines in her purse.

She was convicted of a drug felony and served two years in prison
before the Wyoming Supreme Court ruled the search of her purse was
illegal.

In dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David
Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, faulted the majority for abandoning
"settled distinction between drivers and their passengers."

In a separate case, the Supreme Court ruled that judges cannot impose
stiffer punishments on criminal defendants who plead guilty but refuse
at sentencing to give details about the crime.

The 5-4 ruling in a Pennsylvania drug case said holding such
defendants' silence against them would impose "an impermissible burden
on the exercise of the constitutional right against compelled
self-incrimination."