MORE LEEWAY FOR POLICE IN DRUG SEARCHES IN CARS

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

The 6-3 decision overturned a ruling last year by the Supreme Court of
Wyoming, which said 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 be longings.

The closed container in this case was a purse belonging to a passenger
in a car that police in Wyoming had stopped for speeding.

The driver said he used a hypodermic syringe, visible in his shirt
pocket, to administer drugs, and police clearly had probable cause to
search the car, the court said.

Despite knowing the purse belonged to the passenger 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 the passenger's
conviction for drug possession.

In his majority opinion Monday, Justice Antonin Scalia said the
Wyoming court had drawn a distinction incorrectly, 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.

It would be confusing for the police and local judges, Scalia said, if
a national rule were set that allowed searches of some containers in
cars but not others, depending upon 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.

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.

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 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 did not involve a passenger, and
since then courts have disagreed on the 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 in the 1979 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.

Legal experts who have tracked the court's cases on car searches said
the ruling was more of a clarification than a bold departure.

"This is not so much new as it is more of the same," said Boston
University law professor Tracey Maclin. "All these decisions basically
say that once you get in your car, you are fair game. It is
significant, though, because it affects potentially millions of people."

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
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."