SPEEDING NO REASON FOR SEARCH

Courts: U.S. Justices are unanimous in ruling that the search of an Iowa
man's car after a traffic stop violated his rights.

Washington-Issuing a speeding ticket does not automatically give the police
the authority to search the car, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously
Tuesday in rejecting the latest invitation from law-enforcement officials
to expand the powers of the police in encounters with motorists.

The court held that police in Iowa violated a driver's constitutional
rights by conducting a full search of his car based on nothing more than a
speeding violation, for which the police issued a citation. The search
turned up marijuana and led to the man's conviction on state narcotics
charges.

An Iowa law, the only one of its kind in the country, authorizes the police
to conduct the same kind of search after issuing a citation, for traffic or
other offenses, that Supreme Court precedents permit as an aspect of making
an arrest. The Iowa Supreme Court upheld the law, and the search at issue
in this case, in a 5-4 vote last year.

In an opinion Tuesday by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the justices
did not declare the Iowa law unconstitutional in all possible applications.
But for a simple speeding offense, Rehnquist said, the justifications for
the court's doctrine permitting a "search incident to arrest" simply do not
apply.

Twenty-five years ago, when the court first announced in United States vs.
Robinson that the police could search the area under the control of a
person they had just arrested, the justices offered two rationales for what
was, in effect, an exception to the Fourth Amendment requirement that
searches must ordinarily be authorized by search warrants.

Such searches were justified by the need to protect the safety of the
arresting officers and to prevent the suspect from destroying evidence, the
court said in its 1973 ruling.

Writing for the court Tuesday in Knowles vs. Iowa, No 97-7597, Rehnquist
said the threat to the police from issuing a traffic ticket, which he
called a "relatively brief encounter," was "a good deal less than in the
case of a custodial arrest." And there is no further evidence to discover
in a speeding case, he said.

The defendant in this case, Patrick Knowles, was driving 43mph in a 25mph
zone when the police stopped him in Newton, Iowa, in 1996. At a hearing
after his arrest for marijuana possession, he challenged the
constitutionality of the search. The officer testified that he had no basis
for suspecting a crime other than speeding, but had conducted the search
under the state law authorizing searches "incident to the citation."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski