NO FISHING

The Utah Highway Patrol has had its fishing license revoked.

Again.

For the second time in three years, the Utah Supreme Court has ruled that
highway checkpoints supposedly set up to check for drunk drivers or for
compliance with licensing and safety rules must be limited to those
purposes.

Otherwise, the court ruled, officers are engaged in a "pretext" to stop and
search all vehicles without the constitutionally required reason to suspect
a particular person of a particular crime. Such sweeps, the court noted in
2000, and again in a ruling filed Friday, are too much like the Crown
warrants issued in colonial days, warrants that gave officials the authority
to search anyone, for anything, anytime they felt like it.

"A free society," the Utah high court correctly concluded, "cannot tolerate
such a practice."

The most recent case rose from an I-70 checkpoint near Salina set up in
February of 2000. There, a driver from Colorado was deemed by officers to be
not only "very nervous" and insufficiently dressed for such a cold day, but
also to smell somewhat of marijuana. He wound up having his possessions
screened by two drug-sniffing dogs, apparently on hand to help officers
check driver's licenses and turn signals.

The driver sought to have the drugs that were discovered -- minuscule
amounts of marijuana and cocaine -- disqualified from being entered into
evidence against him. Checkpoints in Utah require prior authorization from a
judge, and the defendant's argument was that the authorization used that day
was too broad and that the whole operation amounted to a warrantless search,
in violation of both the U.S. and Utah constitutions.

The trial court would not exclude the evidence and the defendant was
convicted of possession. But the Supreme Court ruled that the evidence
should be thrown out, as was the evidence gathered at another checkpoint
that the same court rejected in its 2000 ruling.

The Utah Supreme Court, again agreeing with the U.S. Supreme Court, ruled
that officers operating highway checkpoints must keep their focus strictly
on matters related to highway safety, checking for unsafe drivers, unsafe or
unlicensed vehicles and compliance with such things as seat-belt laws and
the laws governing commercial trucks.

Other policing, such as uncovering illegal drugs, must still be governed by
the same laws that operate everywhere else. Officers must have a specific
warrant or, at the very least, reason to suspect a specific crime by a
specific individual. Simply the knowledge that there are bad people who
carry bad things on the highway, our courts have repeatedly ruled, is not
grounds for search and seizure.

It is troubling that the court has had to make, essentially, the same ruling
twice. One would hope that, this time, the UHP will get the message.