POLICE CAN SEARCH PASSENGERS' GEAR

WASHINGTON -- Police officers who have probable cause to search a car for
illegal drugs can search the 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 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 vs. Houghton, 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 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 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. "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."

In other cases:

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

- - 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.

Writing for the majority, Kennedy said 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
vs. U.S.; Rehnquist, along with O'Connor and Thomas, joined the dissent.

- - 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 vs. 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 today before the Supreme Court issued a stay of execution
on Friday.

n Refusing 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.

State Judge Thomas Cooper ordered the newspaper and other news organizations
to refrain from reporting what the tape disclosed until jurors for the
defendant's trial had been selected and sequestered. The defendant, B.J.
Quattlebaum, later was convicted and sentenced to death. He remains on South
Carolina's death row. A deputy sheriff has been indicted and charged with
illegally taping what should have been a confidential conversation. The
deputy, awaiting trial, has been suspended without pay.

- - In a unanimous decision, the court ruled that prosecutors don't violate
lawyers' rights to practice their profession by having them searched and
interfering with their ability to advise a client appearing before a grand
jury. The decision said such a search in a California case, "whether
calculated to annoy or even to prevent consultation with a grand jury
witness," did not violate a lawyer's constitutional rights.

- - In a 6-3 ruling, justices clarified the deadline for transferring cases
from state court to federal court, saying the 30- day clock begins to run
when someone is formally served and receives a copy of a lawsuit. Even
though an Illinois company was faxed a copy of a lawsuit two weeks before it
was formally served, the 30-day clock did not begin to run until formal
service was completed, the court ruled.