THE SUPREME COURT AVOIDS A SPEED TRAP

The U.S. Supreme Court justices in a recent ruling seemed shocked,
shocked that Iowa police had got it into their heads they could search
any drivers and cars they pulled over for routine traffic violations.
But the court needed only to look at its own rulings in recent years
to see where the idea came from that privacy claims have little
standing against the claims of law enforcement convenience.

The court's record of indifference to privacy issues is not perfect
but it leans heavily against any but the most narrow and literal
readings of the Constitution's Fourth Amendment guarantees. The court
has been winking for years at supposedly forbidden "unreasonable
searches and seizures" that violate the "right of the people to be
secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects."

Indeed, the justices needed to refer back only a week to their ruling
that guests in your home don't enjoy the protection that you do from
warrantless police searches. Perhaps overnight guests would, some
justices said, but not day visitors, a distinction notable mainly for
its arbitrariness. Your home may still be your castle, but it could
become a dungeon for drop-ins.

As the court became more conservative with Reagan and Bush appointees
- - a condition little changed by Clinton's two - it came to favor the
power of the state over the liberty of individuals. (An odd tack for
conservatism, one would thinks, but there you are.)

In 1986 the justices held that governments can outlaw and punish even
the homebound, consensual exercise of sex acts a legislative majority
chooses to proscribe. It would be difficult to imagine a more
intrusive extension of police power.

The court has been increasingly indulgent of forced drug tests in
schools and workplaces even when no drug use is suspected. It has
shrugged off school-house strip-searches of students. In an Ohio case,
the court endorsed the search of the car of a driver arrested for
speeding - an obvious precursor to the Iowa law that permitted such
searches for any traffic stop.

That broad grant of police power finally was too much for the court.
It meant anyone driving in Iowa was subject to a search for criminal
evidence at any officer's whim. All that was required was an officer's
willingness to write a ticket charging the driver with fudging a red
light, creeping through a stop sign, beating the speed limit by a few
miles. Officers could, in practice, stop and search motorists for
spite, sport or just because they didn't like a driver's looks.

The latest ruling gives only feeble cause for encouragement. Its
unanimity shows that the justices do, at the extreme, have some sort
of gag reflex against privacy violations, but the justices made only a
very fine distinction, one between searching drivers "arrested" for a
traffic violation (OK) and merely ticketed (not OK).

The justices show no inclination to rethink their burdening body of
decisions that have steadily narrowed the zones and conditions in
which Americans can reasonably expect to be shielded from the
rummaging intrusions of a nosey state.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady