SUPREME COURT SAYS POLICE CAN'T SEARCH PEOPLE IN ROUTINE STOPS

The decision ran counter to the court's trend of narrowing privacy rights.

WASHINGTON - In a rare win for privacy rights, the Supreme Court
ruled Tuesday that police cannot search people and their cars after
merely ticketing them for routine traffic violations.

Such a search - without suspicion of other wrongdoing - is
unreasonable and unconstitutional, the court ruled unanimously in an
Iowa case.

The justices said police unlawfully searched an Iowa man's car after
he was stopped for speeding. The search found marijuana and a pipe in
Patrick Knowles' car.

The decision amounted to "a pretty resounding no" to police, said
Knowles' lawyer, Paul Rosenberg. Allowing the search would have
created a "very big category of permissible searches," he said.

"Which of us has not at some point gone over the speed limit or made
an illegal left turn?" added Brooklyn Law professor Susan Herman, who
signed a friend-of-the-court brief on Knowles' behalf.

Even Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who wrote the court's
opinion, was ticketed in 1986 for driving 41 mph in a 30 mph zone in
his hometown of Arlington, Va.

During arguments in the case last month, Iowa's lawyer acknowledged
that the state law would even let police search someone stopped for
jaywalking.

The ruling disappointed the National Association of Police
Organizations. Traffic stops are "one of the least predictable and
most dangerous duties of a law enforcement officer," said Robert
Scully, the group's executive director.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that police can search people after
arresting them, citing a need to disarm suspects and preserve evidence.

But Rehnquist wrote for the court Tuesday that those needs are not as
great when someone is simply being given a traffic citation.

Concern for officer safety may justify ordering a driver and
passengers out of the car but "does not by itself justify the often
considerably greater intrusion attending a full field-type search,"
Rehnquist said.

Police already have the authority to perform a patdown search of
motorists if the officer has reason to suspect they may be armed, the
chief justice noted. He also discounted prosecutors' argument that
officers needed to search Knowles' car to preserve evidence.

"No further evidence of excessive speed was going to be found either
on the person of the offender or in the passenger compartment of the
car," Rehnquist said.

The decision ran counter to the court's trend over the past several
decades of dramatically narrowing the privacy rights afforded by the
Constitution's Fourth Amendment.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady