Random Bus Drug Searches Illegal, Judge Rules

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that police officers may not make drug arrests and search for narcotics by climbing aboard buses and randomly questioning passengers.

U.S. District Judge Stanley Sporkin declared that the “indiscriminate stopping and questioning” of people on interstate buses as part of the nation’s war on drugs “seems to have gone too far.”

Sporkin’s opinion came in the case of Dennis S. Lewis, a bus rider arrested in Washington, D.C., and accused of carrying drugs from New York. The judge said police made an illegal seizure in their questioning of Lewis, and he granted the defendant’s motion to suppress as evidence drugs taken in the arrest.

When he was approached Oct. 19 in the bus terminal at Union Station by an officer of the Metropolitan Police Narcotic Interdiction Unit, Lewis denied carrying narcotics or weapons. He consented to a search by the plainclothes detective, who found a packet of cocaine in one of Lewis’ socks. Subsequently, marijuana was found in Lewis’ jacket pocket and heroin was found in a bag on the floor at his seat on the bus.

The detective testified at a Dec. 14 hearing that he had no particular reason for questioning Lewis and that “sometimes I’ll just walk up to anyone who may be on the bus and ask to talk to them.”

“The specter of passengers riding on a public vehicle of mass transportation being approached by police officers and searched on a strictly random and indiscriminate basis really does not square with the rights protected under the Constitution,” the judge said.