Rulings in Last Four Years Give Police More Authority : Supreme Court Does Its Part in War on Drugs

The Supreme Court has been doing its part in the war on drugs.

In more than a dozen rulings in the last four years, the high court has overturned lower court rulings that favored drug dealers who claimed their constitutional rights were violated during their arrest or trial. In scores of other cases, the court has just said “No” to appeals from convicted drug dealers, thereby upholding their convictions in lower courts.

Consequently, police now have considerably more authority to combat the drug trade, and the areas that are off-limits to police searches have shrunk.

“You can name 10 or 15 areas of law, and in each case the court has given the police more of an opening,” said Gerald M. Caplan, a George Washington University expert in criminal law. “In the ‘60s, the police used to feel they were on trial because of the court’s rulings. Now it seems the court is battling the judges.”

Although the Fourth Amendment bans “unreasonable searches and seizures,” the court has held that it is reasonable for police to search without a warrant in a yard behind a house, above the yard in a circling airplane, in the garbage cans at curbside and in a closed container in a car.

And the court has given Customs Service agents and police increased authority to search for drugs on ships along the coast, in baggage at airports and in cars and planes entering and leaving the country.

When Baltimore police obtained a warrant to search an apartment but broke into the wrong unit, the Supreme Court last year reversed a ruling by Maryland’s highest court and said that seized drug evidence could be used because the officers had made “an honest mistake.”

When Detroit police pursued a man along the sidewalk until he threw away a packet of drugs, the Michigan courts said the man could not be legally seized because the police had no reason to follow him in the first place. Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court reversed that ruling and said the pursuit was neither a search nor a seizure and was therefore legal.

Court ‘Under Pressure’

“I think they feel under pressure to do something about drugs, so they are trying to bring into line the few liberal (appeals) courts we have left,” said University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar. “They have been down-sizing the Fourth Amendment and nearly wiped out the search warrant requirement, but I don’t see that’s made much difference. Drugs seem to be more readily available than ever.”

He and other legal experts noted that the justices usually agree to hear criminal cases only when a federal appellate court or a state court has ruled that the rights of a drug suspect had been violated. When the lower courts rule against the drug dealer, the court typically refuses to hear an appeal.

Consider the court’s disposition of two recent appeals in drug cases that had been decided by California’s U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

A Nervous Passengar

In the first case, narcotics agents spotted an airline passenger named Andrew Sokolow at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was wearing gold jewelry and a black jump suit, acted nervously and paid for a ticket to Hawaii with a large wad of cash. Because Sokolow fit the “drug courier profile,” the agents questioned him, searched his bags and found cocaine.

On a 2-1 vote, the appeals court rejected Sokolow’s conviction on grounds that wearing jewelry, being nervous and carrying cash were not reasonable indicators of criminal activity and did not justify stopping Sokolow for questioning.

Two weeks ago, the high court granted the appeal of government lawyers and said it would hear the case (U.S. vs. Andrew Sokolow, 87-1295) in its fall term.

Cash Found in Baggage

In the second case, U.S. Customs Service agents searched the checked baggage of another airline passenger, Carlos Nates, while he was boarding a plane at Los Angeles International Airport bound for Colombia. They found $105,000 in cash, believed to be the proceeds of drug dealing, and arrested him.

His lawyer contended that the search was unlawful because customs agents had the authority to search only bags entering the country, not those leaving. This time, on a 2-1 vote, the appeals court upheld the conviction. Last week, the Supreme Court dismissed further appeals in the case (Nates vs. U.S., 87-1556) and upheld the conviction.

Criminal lawyers say that a drug case the high court is expected to decide this week will provide an interesting test of how far the justices will go in limiting the Fourth Amendment to preserve a drug conviction.

Stakeout at Warehouse

The case arose when federal drug agents in Boston staked out a warehouse in 1983 and watched what they believed to be truckloads of drugs moving in and out. Rather than obtaining a warrant from a magistrate to search the warehouse, the agents, accompanied by a U.S. attorney, broke down the doors and saw huge bundles of marijuana inside.

Then the agents went to the courthouse and, without telling the magistrate what they had seen, swore that they had probable cause to believe drugs were inside the warehouse. Two men, Michael Murray and James Carter, were arrested and the marijuana seized.

The lower federal courts held that it was proper to search the warehouse without a warrant. Relying on the doctrine of “inevitable discovery,” they maintained that the evidence would have been inevitably discovered by agents anyway.

U.S. Aided Defendants

In this case (Murray and Carter vs. the U.S., 86-995), the Justice Department took the side of the accused drug traffickers by appealing the lower court rulings to the Supreme Court.

A. Raymond Randolph, then a deputy U.S. solicitor general, told the court that search warrants would lose their purpose if drug agents could break into a home or business without a warrant, search the premises and then seek a warrant. He pointed out that the framers of the Bill of Rights wrote the Fourth Amendment in response to the practice of 18th-Century British customs agents of breaking into warehouses whenever they chose in the same area of Boston.

However the court rules in that case, legal experts believe that even more important decisions will come next year. The justices have agreed to hear two cases in the fall that challenge the constitutionality of mandatory drug testing of Customs Service employees who seek promotions and of railroad crews involved in accidents.