Right to Stop Drug Suspects Widened : Agents May Search Air Travelers Who Act Like Couriers, High Court Holds

The Supreme Court, giving the government another weapon in the war on drugs, ruled Monday that agents may stop and question airline passengers who look and act like drug couriers.

If agents have a “reasonable suspicion” that a traveler is carrying drugs, they may question him and search his bags without violating his privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said in 7-2 ruling.

In a separate opinion, the court ruled that a city may set up separate dance halls for teen-agers to protect them from the “corrupting influences” of older customers of such establishments.

In the drug case (U.S. vs. Sokolow, 87-1295), the court upheld the airport arrest of a Honolulu man who was returning home from a quick trip to Miami.

Paid for Ticket With Cash

Rehnquist said that the combined weight of several pieces of evidence can give agents sufficient reason to detain a suspect. Agents saw the passenger, Andrew Sokolow, pay for his $2,100 ticket with a wad of $20 bills. His ticket called for a two-day round trip to a city known for its drug trafficking. He was traveling under an assumed name. He did not check any baggage. He was said to be “very nervous” when seen by agents on a stopover at Los Angeles International Airport. And he was wearing a black jump suit with a gold chain.

“Any one of these factors is not by itself proof of any illegal conduct and is quite consistent with innocent travel,” Rehnquist said. “But we think, taken together, they amount to reasonable suspicion.”

U.S. narcotics agents found 1,063 grams of cocaine in a shoulder bag when they stopped Sokolow outside the Honolulu airport on July 25, 1984. But the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco threw out Sokolow’s conviction and five-year prison sentence, ruling that drug agents may not stop passengers simply because they look or act like criminals.

Since 1974, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has operated a surveillance program in the nation’s major airports in an effort to spot and apprehend drug traffickers. Agents rely in part on a “drug courier profile” of suspicious characteristics to choose their targets.

If the 9th Circuit standard were followed, it “would outlaw a large percentage of the stops of suspected narcotics traffickers who pass through the nation’s airports,” government attorneys had told the justices.

The ruling goes further than previous Supreme Court decisions toward upholding the detention and subsequent search of a person based on evidence that is not criminal in itself.

Didn’t Endorse Profile

The high court did not specifically endorse the DEA’s use of a drug courier profile. Instead, Rehnquist said that the evidence gathered by agents gave them sufficient reason to detain Sokolow.

In two splintered decisions in the early 1980s, the court was unable to achieve a consensus on whether drug agents may stop and search an airline passenger whose behavior was suspicious.

However, in more than a dozen rulings over the last three years, the justices have given government officials more leeway to pursue drug suspects. The court has not ruled that government agents violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures in any drug case considered since Rehnquist became chief justice in 1986.

May Check Garbage Cans

In the last year, the court has ruled that police officers may inspect garbage cans left at curb side, that low-flying helicopters may be used to spot marijuana plants, that policemen may pursue a person who flees on seeing a squad car and that government employees may be required to take drug tests on the job.

University of Michigan law professor Yale Kamisar, a criminal law expert, criticized the Rehnquist court for “down-sizing the Fourth Amendment” to allow law enforcement to fight the drug war.

“I think they feel pressure because of the horrors of drug trafficking, so they are trying to bring into line the few liberal courts we have left,” he said.

Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. dissented in the drug courier case, arguing that drug agents should not be permitted to seize a suspect unless they have “at least some evidence of criminal conduct.”

Meanwhile, the court overturned a Texas decision that said that young people have a right of “social association” that bars the creation of separate dance halls for teen-agers.

Two years ago, a Texas appellate court struck down a Dallas ordinance creating special dance halls for people 14 to 18 years old on the grounds that the law restricted their freedom of association under the First Amendment.

There is no constitutionally protected right of social association for teen-agers or anyone else, Rehnquist wrote for a unanimous court. If Dallas city officials believe it would be beneficial to segregate teen-agers from older persons, they are free to do so without running afoul of the U.S. Constitution, he said in the case (Dallas vs. Stanglin, 87-1848).

The Constitution makes no mention of freedom of association, but the Supreme Court has said that protecting the free speech of political groups requires that their members be free to associate with anyone they choose. In other cases, the court has referred to a freedom of “intimate association” among members of a family.

1,000 Youths in Dance Hall

Neither has anything to do with dance halls, Rehnquist said. Of the more than 1,000 young people who gather at the Twilight Skating Rink and dance hall in Dallas, many are strangers to one another, he said, and those young people certainly do not “take positions on public questions.”

In recent years, members of all-male private clubs have argued that their right to freedom of association permitted them to exclude women, but they have fared no better before the high court than the Dallas teen-agers.

In other actions, the court:

--Ruled 6 to 3 that Indian tribal courts have jurisdiction over the custody of Indian babies, even if the parents leave a reservation to give up their children for adoption. Citing a 1978 law, Justice Brennan said that Congress intended to keep Indian children on reservations.

“Tribal jurisdiction under (the 1978) law was not meant to be defeated by the actions of individual members of the tribe,” Brennan said in the case (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians vs. Holyfield, 87-980). Rehnquist and Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony M. Kennedy dissented.

Takes Up Boeing Case

--Agreed to decide whether the Boeing Co. violated a federal conflict-of-interest law by giving large severance payments to five employees who were leaving to take top jobs in the Ronald Reagan Administration.

One of the five, Melvin R. Paisley, was awarded $183,000 before becoming assistant secretary of the Navy for research. Since leaving the Defense Department, Paisley has become a subject of the government’s investigation of fraud in defense procurement.

Boeing said that its payments were intended to “encourage public service,” but a federal appeals court in Richmond said that they appeared designed to give extra compensation to influential government officials. The case (Boeing vs. United States, 88-938) will be heard in the fall.

--Agreed to decide whether a Baltimore mother may be kept in jail until she tells where her abused child is being kept (Baltimore Department of Social Services vs. Bouknight, 88-1182). Authorities suspect that the woman may have killed her baby, but a Maryland appellate court ruled that she has a right to remain silent and may not be held in jail for refusing to talk. In December, acting on an emergency appeal by city officials, Rehnquist had ordered the woman held.