COURT HOLDS CITIES MORE ACCOUNTABLE FOR ABUSE BY POLICE

WASHINGTON -- A city can be sued for inadequate police training that leads
to a single death or injury, rather than a pattern of abuse, according to a
ruling left intact Monday by the Supreme Court.

Without comment, the justices refused to hear objections from Muskogee,
Okla., clearing the way for the trial of a lawsuit filed by a woman who
blamed "inadequate training" of police officers for the shooting death of
her armed, emotionally disturbed husband.

In previous rulings, the Supreme Court made it tough to sue a city for
inadequate training under federal law. But in the ruling made final in the
Muskogee case, a federal appeals panel based in Denver said even a single
unconstitutional incident could be enough to prove a claim of inadequate
training.

"To my knowledge, no other federal appeals court has come to that
conclusion," said Jim Priest, an Oklahoma City lawyer representing
Muskogee. As a result, he said, "there are now thousands of police agencies
that can be held liable for `inadequate training' " under federal law.

The ruling of the federal appeals panel is binding in only six states:
Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Kansas, Colorado and Oklahoma.

The case against Muskogee, a city of about 70,000 people southeast of
Tulsa, highlighted a continuing dispute over the liability of cities for
the way in which police officers are trained. In recent cases, the Supreme
Court limited liability to a "narrow range of circumstances" in which
deficient training shows deliberate indifference to the constitutional
rights of citizens.

In July, a panel voted 2-1 that Marilyn Allen vs. Muskogee fit within that
narrow range. Allen produced evidence that police officers knew her
husband, Terry, was armed, in a car and suicidal when they approached him
and ordered him to drop his gun. "Go ahead and kill me," Terry Allen
replied. "I want to die."

The officers tried to disarm Terry Allen, who pointed his gun at them. Both
he and two of the officers fired, and Terry Allen died of gunshot wounds.

The officers said they did what they were trained to do, but an expert
witness, George Kirkham, testified that it was "reckless behavior" and
"plain foolishness" for the officers to have walked up to a suicidal, armed
person, stand in the open and try to grab his gun. Properly trained
officers, he said, would have tried to communicate calmly from a covered
position.

A different federal panel found sufficient evidence of unreasonable force
to send Marilyn Allen's case against Muskogee officers to trial. Their
lawyers vainly urged the Supreme Court not to let federal courts
"second-guess the split-second decisions of law enforcement officers in
flagrant examples of Monday-morning quarterbacking." But the justices
denied that appeal, too.

* The Supreme Court also allowed the White House to continue random drug
testing of some federal employees as a means of protecting the president
and vice president.

Arthur Stigile and Ellen Balis, economists in the Office of Management and
Budget, complained that their privacy rights are threatened by testing of
employees who hold passes to the Old Executive Office Building, which is
next to the White House.

The justices refused to disturb a lower court's conclusion that the testing
program was a reasonable means of coping with the risk that a drug user
could be vulnerable to bribery or intimidation or be "blackmailed into
using his access to the building to assist in an attack on the president."

The risk of an attack inside the White House perimeter might be novel,
administration lawyers said, but "no president was ever killed in a theater
until Lincoln, in a railway station until Garfield, in a reception line
until McKinley, or in an open car until Kennedy."