CIVIL RIGHTS ON A GREYHOUND

In the Fourth Amendment, the founders guaranteed us the right to be secure
against unreasonable searches and seizures. Over the years the Supreme
Court has developed a complex set of rules for searches in different venues
- - homes, cars, factory floors. Yesterday the court decided a case about
passengers on a Greyhound bus who were not told they had the right to
refuse to be searched. By a 6-to-3 vote it upheld the search, a decision we
believe is mistaken.

The bus in yesterday's case had made a scheduled stop in Tallahassee, Fla.
When the driver disembarked, three policemen boarded. One took the driver's
seat while the other two moved down the narrow aisle, asking to check the
passengers' luggage and persons. Two passengers were found to be concealing
cocaine on their bodies.

The passengers were not legally required to permit the search - if they had
said no, the police would have had to leave them alone. The question is,
was the situation on the bus sufficiently coercive that the passengers
would reasonably have thought they had to cooperate? If so, the Fourth
Amendment would have required the police to inform the passengers that they
had the right to refuse.

The test, the court has held, is whether a reasonable person would have
felt free "to ignore the police presence and go about his business." When a
policeman goes up to a person on the street and asks him a question, the
person can respond and keep walking. But when three policemen surround a
suspect in a narrow alley the person might feel he has to do as he is told.

It would have been hard for the passengers on the Greyhound bus to ignore
the police, and under the circumstances, the police should have conveyed
through words what the physical layout did not - that the passengers were
free to tell them no.

The court majority chose to view bus travel as akin to air travel. But this
is not the case. Air passengers have long known that they and their bags
are subject to search. Thus far, this has not been true for bus travelers.

As long as the "war on terror" rages, there will be pressure to do away
with the fine points of Fourth Amendment law. But with the Bush
administration increasingly intent on engaging in domestic spying, often
with little or no judicial oversight, we need those protections now more
than ever.