High Court Upholds Sobriety Checkpoints : Judiciary: It rules that public safety prevails over a motorist’s right to privacy. The decision is the latest in a series favoring law enforcement officials.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that police may set up roadblocks on highways and routinely stop motorists to see if they are sober.

In balancing a state’s interest in catching drunk drivers against a motorist’s right to privacy, the high court said that public safety clearly should prevail.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist said that a 30-second stop at a police checkpoint is a small price to pay for combatting the carnage caused by drunk drivers. In 1988, more than 23,000 Americans were killed and about 500,000 were seriously injured in auto accidents in which alcohol played a role, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The ruling, hailed by opponents of drunk driving but criticized by civil libertarians, extends a series of decisions in which the Supreme Court has held in favor of law enforcement officials in search and seizure cases.

Since 1984, the California Highway Patrol has used sobriety checkpoints, but officials say that they are more useful for deterring drunk driving than actually catching impaired motorists. Last year, only 591 of nearly 52,000 vehicles stopped at checkpoints--about 1% of the total--resulted in arrests for drunk driving, said Steve Kohler, a patrol spokesman in Sacramento.

Still, the state courts were split on whether it was constitutional for the police to stop hundreds of sober motorists in hopes of finding an occasional drunk driver. Courts in 19 states, including California, had upheld the practice. But courts in 12 other states, including Michigan, had ruled that the checkpoints violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The Michigan courts concluded that the checkpoints were unreasonable because they rarely resulted in drunk-driving arrests.

Rehnquist, writing for a 6-3 majority, quickly dismissed that argument. It is up to the police, not the courts, to decide whether the checkpoints are effective, he said. “For the purposes of Fourth Amendment analysis, the choice among reasonable alternatives remains with the government officials who have a unique understanding of, and a responsibility for, limited public resources,” he wrote in reversing the Michigan court.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving hailed the ruling as a “great victory” and urged officials in every community in the nation to set up sobriety checkpoints as “a key element in an all-out campaign to finally rid our roads of the menace posed by drinking drivers.”

However, civil libertarians denounced the court for allowing the police to stop a motorist even though they have no reason to believe he is violating the law.

“It is alarming that Rehnquist completely defers to police. It’s the court’s job to decide whether a particular police practice is constitutional,” said Loren Siegel, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the Michigan checkpoint law.

Nevertheless, the ruling came as no surprise. Since Rehnquist took over as chief justice in 1986, the high court has routinely ruled for the police in search and seizure cases, particularly when drugs are involved. Last year, for example, the court upheld mandatory drug tests for workers whose jobs involve safety or sensitive information and declared that airport police officers may stop and question travelers who look like drug couriers. Earlier this year, the court said U.S. agents may search for and seize evidence outside of U.S borders without answering to the federal courts.

“I can’t tell you the last time we won a Fourth Amendment case” in the Supreme Court, the ACLU’s Siegel said.

Under the Fourth Amendment, police officers are not permitted to search a home unless they have “probable cause” to believe a crime has been committed. In 1968, the court said that policemen may briefly stop and question someone on the streets if they have at least a reasonable suspicion that he is engaged in wrongdoing. In the case of checkpoints, however, policemen stop motorists even though they have no reason to believe an individual driver is impaired.

But Rehnquist pointed out that the court, in the 1976 case of U.S. vs. Martinez-Fuerte, had upheld the U.S. Border Patrol’s practice of stopping all cars along Interstate 5 near San Clemente, Calif., to search for illegal aliens.

“The intrusion resulting from a brief stop at the sobriety checkpoint (in Michigan) is for constitutional purposes indistinguishable from the checkpoint stops we upheld in Martinez-Fuerte,” Rehnquist wrote in the current case (Michigan State Police vs. Sitz, 88-1897).

The three dissenters called sobriety checkpoints “elaborate and disquieting publicity stunts.” Justice John Paul Stevens said that guns and drugs, like intoxication, are serious social problems but that the Fourth Amendment nonetheless does not permit “random, suspicion-less” searches to round up suspects. He was joined in dissent by Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall.

In other actions, the court:

--Upheld a determination by the Bush Administration that Social Security payments do not constitute “child support,” a policy that saves the government $44 million a year by limiting welfare payments to needy children. Nearly 3.2 million children receive Social Security payments, either because a parent has died, is disabled or retired. In 1984, Congress said that, when poor families calculate their incomes for determining their welfare payments, they can disregard the first $50 a month that they receive in “child support payments.” The question here was whether the money a child receives from Social Security is a child support payment.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said that the money is not such a payment and therefore must be counted as family income. For a family of three in Virginia, where this case arose, a ruling in their favor would have added $19 a month to their $265-a-month welfare payment. The four dissenters in the case (Sullivan vs. Stroop, 89-535) accused the conservative majority of a “crabbed interpretation” of the law that “arbitrarily deprive(s) certain families of a modest but urgently needed welfare benefit.”

--Ruled that a gasoline refiner may not sell its product cheaper to a wholesaler than a retailer if the wholesaler also sells retail gasoline (Texaco vs. Hasbrouck, 87-2048). The 9-0 decision upholds a $1.3-million antitrust verdict against Texaco Inc., won by 12 service stations in Spokane, Wash. The Robinson-Patman Act forbids price discrimination among buyers, but the court has allowed discounts for wholesalers. But, in this case, a jury concluded that the two wholesalers in Spokane were actually operating as retailers, so it ruled that Texaco violated the law.

--Ruled, 9 to 0, that polluters may be fined by the Environmental Protection Agency, even though the agency has failed to consider a state plan that alters pollution standards. The case (GM vs. U.S., 89-369) concerned the legal time limits for EPA to approve or disapprove state pollution plans, but the decision likely will have little impact because Congress is now rewriting the law.