SUPREME COURT OKAYS ARREST OF ALL OCCUPANTS IN CARS WHERE UNCLAIMED DRUGS
ARE FOUND

Better a hundred innocent people get hauled off in handcuffs than one
drug law violator go free. That is the essence of the Supreme Court's
ruling in the case of Maryland v. Pringle, handed down Monday. The
Supreme Court held that Baltimore County police acted properly four
years ago when they arrested all three occupants of a car after the
officers discovered drugs and cash inside and everyone denied owning
them.

The ruling reversed the decision of Maryland's highest court, which
last year threw out the conviction of the one man eventually tried in
the case, Jerome Pringle. The Maryland court held that Pringle's
arrest was unconstitutional because police had no reason to believe he
was individually involved in a crime. "A policy of arresting everyone
until somebody confesses is not constitutionally unacceptable," that
court held.

The Supreme Court disagreed. "We think it an entirely reasonable
inference from these facts that any or all three of the occupants had
knowledge of, and exercised dominion and control over, the cocaine,"
Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote for the court. "Thus a
reasonable officer could conclude that there was probable cause to
believe Pringle committed the crime of possession of cocaine, either
solely or jointly."

The justices were faced with the task of applying the notion of
probable cause to a situation where either innocent people would be
arrested in the search for a guilty party or a guilty person would go
free for fear of violating the rights of others.

The court held that police may now constitutionally arrest the
innocent.

Friends of a tough line on law enforcement hailed the ruling. "With
this decision, the court has reaffirmed the necessary flexibility of
the probable cause standard, which allows police to deal appropriately
with the varying circumstances associated with encounters with
criminals on the street," said Charles Hobson, an attorney with the
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a Sacramento-based nonprofit that
filed a friend-of-the-court brief urging the justices to uphold
Pringle's arrest. "The Maryland court's holding had assumed that among
the three passengers in the car, only one could possibly be the drug
dealer.

But the Supreme Court determined that there was nothing unreasonable
about the police suspecting that any one or all three were involved,
and it was certainly not unconstitutional to arrest them based upon
that suspicion," he added.

Defense attorneys and civil liberties groups were decidedly less
enthused. "The Supreme Court should not have taken this case," said
Little Rock attorney John Wesley Hall, Jr. (http://www.fourthamendment.com),
a specialist in Fourth Amendment law and board member of the National
Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "They should have just let
the Maryland decision stand and not worried about it," he told DRCNet.
"The Maryland appeals court decision said that if there wasn't
sufficient evidence to convict Pringle of a crime, there wasn't
sufficient evidence to arrest him. It's like the days of the Warren
Burger court," Hall said. "Every time the state loses, the court
grants certiorari. The idea is to just arrest everyone in the car and
get them to start blaming someone else."

Still, according to Hall, the Supreme Court's decision does not break
new ground as much as it codifies existing police practices. "Down
here, in every case in which I have been involved with similar facts,
they just arrest everyone," he said. "To me, the fact that the Supreme
Court even heard this case says this is just another typical political
decision by the court designed to help the cops."

Tracy Maclin, a Boston University law professor who wrote a
friend-of-the-court brief on Pringle's behalf, was less sanguine than
Hall. "It's going to be easier to arrest people, and there is...
nothing in this opinion to cabin this rationale," Maclin told the
Washington Post Tuesday. "If someone has 20 friends over, and a cop
comes to the house and finds contraband under the couch pillow, what's
to prevent the police from arresting everyone in the house?"

For Steven Silverman, executive director of the Flex Your Rights
Foundation (http://www.flexyourrights.org), an organization devoted to
teaching Americans how to effectively exercise their constitutional
rights, the court's Pringle decision highlights the need for citizens
to protect themselves from police abuses.

Pringle and friends, who consented to a search of their vehicle, could
have avoided all the trouble they found themselves in if they had
exercised their rights, Silverman said. "This case highlights the role
of consent searches in legitimizing subsequent police actions," he
told DRCNet. "Far too frequently, Supreme Court rulings which appear
hostile to civil liberties begin when a criminal suspect consents to a
police search request.

Had the defendant known of his Fourth Amendment right to refuse police
searches, the evidence would not have been discovered, and the
defendant and his companions would not have been arrested. More
importantly, the Supreme Court would have been denied another
opportunity to further expand the 'Drug War Exception' to the Bill of
Rights."

The case arose on the night of August 7, 1999, when a Baltimore County
police officer stopped the vehicle in which Pringle was riding.

After receiving consent to search the vehicle, the officer found $763
in cash in the glove compartment and five bags of crack cocaine
stuffed behind an armrest. The officer arrested all three occupants
after none would admit to being in possession of the drugs.

Pringle admitted the next day that the contraband was his, and is
currently serving a 10-year sentence for possession of cocaine with
intent to distribute.

For citizens, there are two bottom lines here: First, exercise your
rights. Do not consent to suspicionless searches.

Second, if you're carrying contraband and get caught, be prepared to
take the rap. Don't send your friends to jail, too.

Visit http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/03pdf/02-809.pdf to read
the opinion in Maryland v. Pringle online.