CDR: On 60 inches tonight, damn you all
George at Orwellian.Org
George at Orwellian.Org
Tue Nov 28 08:18:11 PST 2000
http://foxnews.com/national/court/scotus_roadblocks.sml
#
# Drug Checkpoints Struck Down by High Court
#
# Tuesday, November 28, 2000
#
# In a divided 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday struck down
# as unconstitutional random roadblocks intended to catch criminals
# trafficking drugs.
#
# The ruling weighed privacy rights against the interests of law
# enforcement and found that Indianapolis' use of drug-sniffing
# dogs to check all cars pulled over at the roadblocks was an
# unreasonable search under the Constitution.
#
# The majority, in an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day
# O'Connor, said the ruling does not affect other kinds of police
# roadblocks such as border checks and drunken-driving checkpoints.
# Those have already been found constitutional.
#
# But the reasoning behind those kinds of roadblocks - chiefly
# that the benefit to the public outweighs the inconvenience -
# cannot be applied broadly, O'Connor wrote.
#
# "If this case were to rest on such a high level of generality,
# there would be little check on the authorities' ability to
# construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement
# purpose," the opinion said.
#
# The three dissenters were the court's most conservative justices:
# Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and
# Clarence Thomas.
#
# Lawyers for Indianapolis conceded that the roadblocks erected
# there in 1998 detained far more innocent motorists than criminals.
#
# The city said its primary aim was to catch drug criminals. Civil
# liberties advocates called the practice heavy-handed and risky,
# and asked the Supreme Court to ban it.
#
# Law enforcement in and of itself is not a good enough reason
# to stop innocent motorists, the majority ruling concluded.
#
# The court was not swayed by the argument that the severity of
# the drug problem in some city neighborhoods justified the
# searches.
#
# "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," the majority opinion
# said.
#
# Cars were pulled over at random in high-crime neighborhoods in
# Indianapolis, motorists questioned, and a drug-sniffing dog led
# around the cars. Most motorists were detained for about three
# minutes.
#
# The city conducted six roadblocks over four months in 1998 before
# the practice was challenged in federal court.
#
# Police stopped 1,161 cars and trucks and made 104 arrests.
# Fifty-five of the arrests were on drug charges.
More information about the cypherpunks-legacy
mailing list