SUPREME COURT RULING REAFFIRMS PROTECTIONS IN THE FOURTH AMENDMENT

The U.S. Supreme Court, ruling in Arizona v. Gant, has limited the
circumstances under which police may search a car after arresting the
driver. The decision, by an unusual majority consisting of Justices
Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Scalia and Thomas, is a welcome reversal of
a recent trend in court decisions that we're inclined to call the
drug-war exception to the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees citizens
the right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,
against unreasonable searches and seizures." Rodney Gant answered the
door at a house in Arizona in 1999 and told officers who had come on
the basis of a tip about illicit drugs that the owners were away but
would be back later.

The officers did a records check and found that Gant had outstanding
warrants for driving on a suspended license. When the police returned,
Gant drove up to the house, and they summoned him over and arrested
him on the suspended-license charge.

Then they searched his car and found cocaine and a gun. They arrested
him on drug and weapons charges.

Gant's attorneys moved to suppress the evidence found in the
search.

The trial court disagreed and he was convicted.

The Arizona Supreme Court agreed that the search was unconstitutional
and reversed the conviction. The state of Arizona appealed to the U.S.
Supreme Court.

The officers in Gant's case were relying on a widespread understanding
of the implications of a 1981 case, Belton v. New York, which has been
interpreted to mean officers can search a car any time they arrest the
driver or passenger, for whatever reason.

The majority in Tuesday's decision argued that this was a
misinterpretation, that Belton and previous cases should be understood
to mean that a search of a car without a warrant is justified only if
officers have reason to believe the arrestee might pose a danger to
officers, perhaps by reaching for a weapon, or have reason to believe
evidence of the crime for which he was arrested might be found. At the
time of the search of Gant's car, Gant was in handcuffs in the back of
a squad car, and the police had all the evidence they needed for the
suspended-license and failure-to-appear charges.

The search amounted to a "fishing expedition" for evidence of another
crime.

Without a warrant, such fishing expeditions are unconstitutional.

We hope this decision represents a determination by the high court to
tighten the standards for searches without warrants.

The trend in recent decades has been to allow the police more latitude
about searches, and the reason for such leniency in almost every case
has been to make it easier to get evidence to convict people on drug
charges.

The fact that the courts and other elements of law enforcement believe
it is necessary to chip away at the privacy protections embodied in
the Fourth Amendment to enforce drug laws should cause people to
rethink the drug laws themselves. If laws cannot be enforced
effectively without chipping away at our constitutional rights - and
they create other social problems such as enriching unscrupulous and
violent gangsters - perhaps it is time to consider repealing them.