JUSTICES RULE READING OF RIGHTS OPTIONAL IN BUS, TRAIN SEARCHES

WASHINGTON - Police do not have to read passengers their rights before
asking to look for drugs or other evidence of a crime aboard buses or
trains, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday.

Officers routinely check buses and trains for drug couriers. Since the
Sept. 11 attacks, they also have focused efforts on possible terrorists who
could be using public transportation.

Police in Tallahassee, Fla., were within their rights to move up the aisle
of a Greyhound bus, asking questions of each passenger and, in the case of
two men wearing heavy clothing on a warm day, asking permission to search
their luggage and bodies, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3.

The officers found bricks of cocaine strapped to the men's legs, and they
were later convicted on drug charges.

The question for the court was whether Christopher Drayton and Clifton
Brown were coerced into cooperating with police, who did not tell them they
had the right to refuse. The Constitution guarantees freedom from
"unreasonable searches or seizures."

The men agreed to the search, and nothing about the fact they were seated
on a bus forced them to say yes, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the
court.

"Police officers act in full accord with the law when they ask citizens for
consent. It reinforces the rule of law for the citizen to advise the police
of his or her wishes and for the police to act in reliance on that
understanding. When this exchange takes place, it dispels inferences of
coercion."

Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices
Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer.

Lawyers for the men argued that with two officers standing in the aisle and
another posted by the front door, the men felt boxed into their seats and
unable to either refuse to answer questions or get up and leave the bus.

Writing for the minority, Justice David H. Souter agreed.

"It is very hard to believe that either Brown or Drayton would have
believed that he stood to lose nothing if he refused to cooperate with the
police, or that he had any free choice to ignore the police altogether,"
Souter wrote. "No reasonable passenger could have believed that, only an
uncomprehending one."

Souter, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said
bus travel is not the same as airline travel, in which passengers routinely
submit to searches of their belonging without a police warrant and without
any individual suspicion that they have anything to hide.

"It is universally accepted that such intrusions are necessary to hedge
against risks that, nowadays, even small children understand," Souter
wrote. "The commonplace precautions of air travel have not, thus far, been
justified for ground transportation however," he noted.

The ruling should have little effect on police work in Virginia, said G.
Russell Stone Jr., special counsel to a multijurisdictional grand jury that
investigates crime in Richmond and the counties of Chesterfield, Hanover
and Henrico.

An interdiction team composed of state, federal and local law enforcement
officers routinely checks passengers at the Amtrak station on Staples Mill
Road and the Greyhound bus terminal on the Boulevard.