SUPREME COURT SAYS IOWA COPS CAN'T SEARCH CARS ROUTINELY

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Government cannot grant police blanket power to search
motorists and cars pulled over for routine traffic stops, a unanimous
Supreme Court ruled Tuesday.

Rejecting pleas by the 220,000-member National Association of Police
Organizations that such expanded authority is needed to protect officers'
safety, the justices sided with Patrick Knowles' challenge to an Iowa law
giving blanket permission for police searches of anyone stopped on roads in
that state.

Police in Newton, Iowa, didn't suspect anything else when they pulled
Knowles over in 1996 for going 43 miles per hour in a 25-mph zone, but
turned up marijuana and a pipe under the driver's seat of his car.

Knowles was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to 90 days in jail.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist, writing for the high court, found that
blanket searches run afoul of the Fourth Amendment's protection against
unreasonable searches when a traffic stop for speeding, a broken taillight
or other minor offense isn't sufficient to justify arrest.

"The threat to officer safety from issuing a traffic citation is a good
deal less than in the case of a custodial arrest," he said. "While concern
for safety during a routine traffic stop may justify the minimal additional
intrusion of ordering a driver and passengers out of a car, it does not by
itself justify the often considerably greater intrusion attending a full
field-type search."

Rehnquist noted that officers have authority to search a motorist being
arrested on other charges for weapons or evidence that are "incident to a
traffic citation," the precedent the high court first set in 1973.

However, the court declined to expand the search-upon-arrest rule "to a
situation where the concern for officer safety is not present to the same
extent and the concern for destruction of evidence is not present at all."

Once the speeding ticket was written, "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 wrote.

The ruling reverses an Iowa Supreme Court decision upholding Knowles' drug
conviction and Iowa's blanket search law. Knowles' appeal noted that Iowa
is the only state that has such a law.

Doug Marek, Iowa deputy attorney general, said his office was disappointed
but not surprised by the ruling. He said he did not expect it to have a
major effect on officers' practices because the law's search provision was
little-used.

A ruling in Iowa's favor would have encouraged other states to enact
similar statutes at the urging of the National Association of Police
Organizations and other groups, according to Steven Shapiro, general
counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union.

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

Tuesday's decision ran counter to the court's trend over the past several
decades of dramatically narrowing the privacy rights afforded by the Fourth
Amendment. Just last week, the justices ruled in a Minnesota case that
people who briefly visit someone's home do not have the same protection
against a police search as an overnight guest or their host.