The New York Times

Wednesday, February 23, 2000

Court Looks at Expansion of Checkpoints for Drugs

By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 -- A decade after upholding the use of roadblocks to catch drunken drivers, the Supreme Court today agreed to decide whether adding a drug-sniffing dog to the checkpoint renders the practice unconstitutional.

The justices accepted an appeal from the City of Indianapolis, where the use of drug-detection roadblocks was declared unconstitutional last year by a federal appeals court. Courts around the country have differed on the legality of this increasingly popular law-enforcement technique.

In this case, Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, said that in contrast to the safety rationale that justified the sobriety checkpoints, the drug-detection roadblocks appeared to be little more than "a pretext for a dragnet search for criminals."

Judge Posner said the Indianapolis program "belongs to the genre of general programs of surveillance which invade privacy wholesale in order to discover evidence of crime," amounting to an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment.

Indianapolis set up the drug roadblocks six times in 1998, stopping 1,161 cars and making 55 arrests for transporting narcotics as well as 49 arrests for other misconduct. The program was challenged in a class-action lawsuit brought by the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.

In its Supreme Court appeal, Indianapolis v. Edmond, No. 99-1030, the city is arguing that the relatively high number of arrests demonstrates the program's usefulness as well as the dimension of the drug problem it was designed to attack.

The city noted that the Supreme Court had ruled in 1983 that a "canine sniff" by a trained drug-detecting dog involves such a minimal intrusion that it is not a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment, which bars unreasonable search and seizure. Consequently, the city is arguing, adding this element to a lawful roadblock could not logically result in a Fourth Amendment violation.

The Supreme Court ruled in a 1990 case, Michigan v. Sitz, that a sobriety checkpoint, while constituting a seizure, was not unreasonable because the interest in public safety outweighed the minimal intrusion on a driver's time and privacy.

In his opinion for the appeals court panel, in which he was joined by Judge Diane P. Wood, Judge Posner said the Michigan case stood for the principle that the general rule requiring the police to have a specific basis for stopping someone could be relaxed for a purpose other than crime detection, like public safety. "Catching crooks" was not such a purpose, he said.

Dissenting in the 2-to-1 decision, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook said state and local governments should have the flexibility to choose the law-enforcement methods they preferred. "The real threat to civil liberties comes from the national government, not from law-enforcement variations that can be avoided by driving a few miles to the east or west," he said.

As the justices returned today from a mid-winter recess, they disposed of hundreds of cases. Because the argument calendar for the current term is now full, the cases granted today and for the next four months will be argued after the new term begins next October. [...]