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No to drug checkpoints
The court has come down on the side of the right to be free from unreasonable searches
11/29/00

Times Editorial

Let's see if we've got this straight. Conservatives believe in limiting the power of government, and liberals believe in expanding it, right? But if that's true, why would the most conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court side with the exercise of government power, leaving the liberals and moderates to vote to curb that power?

The reason may be that Supreme Court justices, like everyone else, are more motivated by personal agendas than by political philosophy. A case to consider:

On Tuesday, the court announced a 6-3 ruling that law enforcement agencies could not set up roadblocks to check cars for illegal drugs. The case involved that very practice in Indianapolis in 1998. More than 1,100 vehicles were stopped, and drug-sniffing dogs were used. About 50 drug arrests resulted - or about 5 percent of the number of cars checked. But the other 95 percent were inconvenienced.


The court's majority held that the job of law enforcement in and of itself was not sufficient to justify any random search for any purpose: While we do not limit the purposes that may justify a checkpoint program to any rigid set of categories, we decline to approve a program whose primary purpose is ultimately indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control.

In dissent were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and associate justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, all of them conservatives.

Rehnquist wrote, Efforts to enforce the law on public highways used by millions of motorists are obviously necessary to our society. The court's opinion today casts a shadow over what has been assumed . . . to be a perfectly lawful activity.

He implied that if random checkpoints are constitutionally permissible for collaring drunk drivers, then the Indianapolis searches should have been legal, as well. One difference, of course, is that a drunk driver is an immediate threat to public safety, and in such circumstances the courts have given law enforcement more latitude.


Authoritarian thinking
Tuesday's ruling doesn't mean that police can't search a car if they have probable cause or if they see drugs or drug paraphernalia. It does mean they can't check people's cars at random just because it's an easy way to identify and arrest law-breakers.

Modern conservatism is dominated by two lines of thought, one libertarian, the other authoritarian. Tuesday's ruling saw the authoritarian side in the three-member minority.


© 2000 The Huntsville Times. Used with permission.

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