JUSTICES EXPAND POWER OF POLICE TO SEARCH CARS

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
yesterday 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 Houghton's conviction
for drug possession.

In his majority opinion yesterday, 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," Scalia said. He
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," Scalia 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 vs. 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 vs.
Ross, did not involve a passenger, and courts have disagreed since then on
the ruling's implications for closed containers that police 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 U.S.
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 vs. Illinois, a decision from which
then- Associate Justice Rehnquist had dissented.

In his opinion yesterday, 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
yesterday'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."

Meanwhile, the court took the following actions:

- - 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."

- - Refused to review a South Carolina judge's order that barred pretrial
reporting on a secretly recorded conversation between a murder defendant and
his lawyer. The justices turned down a Columbia, S.C., newspaper's arguments
that the judge's 1997 "prior restraint" on publication was unconstitutional.

- - Refused to revive a Waco, Texas, television reporter's libel lawsuit over
coverage of a federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound in 1993. John
McLemore's lawsuit accused Dallas-Forth Worth station WFAA-TV of airing
reports which implied that McLemore had tipped the religious sect about the
raid.

A Treasury Department investigation cleared McLemore of any misconduct. The
report said the Davidians were alerted by a postal driver, who had been told
by a Waco TV photographer that a raid was imminent.