U.S. Justices Give Police More Power to Search Cars : Crime: Supreme Court ruling overturns decisions requiring a search warrant to open and examine a bag, a container or luggage.

The Supreme Court, acting in an Orange County drug case, ruled Thursday that police officers who suspect drugs are being hidden may search a car and any closed container inside it without a warrant.

The 6-3 ruling overturns decisions requiring police to get a search warrant to open and examine a bag, a locked container or a piece of luggage.

Once police have probable cause to believe that a crime is being committed, they have a free hand to seize the vehicle and search for evidence, the justices said.

The court majority said it wanted to clarify confusion in the law by adopting “one clear-cut rule to govern automobile searches.” The dissenters complained that the majority had sacrificed the Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches and seizures in the process.

“This court has become a loyal foot soldier in the Executive’s fight against crime,” said Justice John Paul Stevens in dissent.

The decision marks another in a series of recent rulings giving the police more leeway to search for criminal evidence. In a ruling last week, the court said that, once a motorist gives police permission to search his car, officers may open bags or containers within the vehicle.

While none of these Fourth Amendment decisions has changed the law dramatically, each has upheld the powers of the police over the rights of an individual.

The Orange County drug case arose on Oct. 30, 1987, when a Santa Ana man went to an apartment on West Stevens Avenue in Santa Ana. Police had staked out the apartment because, they said, a large quantity of marijuana had been shipped to the address.

Charles Acevedo entered the residence and left 10 minutes later. He carried a brown paper bag that he put into the trunk of a car and drove off.

Police stopped him, opened the trunk and looked in the bag, where they found marijuana. Acevedo maintained that the search was illegal. But when his motion to suppress the evidence was denied, he pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

But a state appeals court in Santa Ana reversed the conviction. Relying on a 1977 Supreme Court ruling, the judges said that the police erred when they opened the brown paper bag without a search warrant.

When the state Supreme Court refused to hear the case (California vs. Acevedo, 89-1690), state prosecutors took it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For at least 15 years, the justices have struggled to apply the Fourth Amendment to automobiles.

Prosecutors have long argued that the right against “unreasonable searches and seizures” was intended to apply to homes, not vehicles on roadways. As a practical matter, officers cannot always go to a courthouse to get a warrant to search a car because the vehicle may be gone when they return, they say.

But civil libertarians have countered that people should not have to give up their right to privacy when they get in their cars.

On Thursday, the justices adopted the prosecutor’s view and returned the law to where it was during the Prohibition era. In a 1925 case, then-Chief Justice William Howard Taft said that officers who have probable cause may stop “an automobile engaged in the transportation of intoxicating liquor . . . without a warrant.” In that case, federal agents saw two men in “an Oldsmobile roadster” leaving a house where liquor was sold. They stopped the car and seized “68 quarts of bonded whiskey and gin.”

Speaking for the court Thursday, Justice Harry A. Blackmun cited this decision and said that the court was adopting Taft’s simple rule that gives police the power to search vehicles thoroughly once they have probable cause.

Earlier decisions barring searches of locked containers had “confused courts and police officers and impeded effective law enforcement,” he said.

Justices joining Stevens in dissenting were Thurgood Marshall and Byron R. White.

State prosecutors were “delighted” with the ruling because it “clarifies the law,” said Deputy State Atty. Gen. Robert M. Foster in San Diego.

But Frederic W. Anderson, the Santa Ana lawyer who represented Acevedo, denounced the court for having “emasculated the Fourth Amendment as it relates to automobile searches. I think it is scary because there is basically no right to privacy in a vehicle,” Anderson said.

In other decisions, the court:

* Ruled 5 to 4 that jurors in highly publicized crime cases need not be closely questioned to see whether they already have concluded that the defendant is guilty.

Simply because jurors had read news account of how an inmate escaped from a work release program in 1988 and killed a shopkeeper does not mean that they cannot be impartial in deciding his guilt, the majority said. In answer to a trial judge’s questions, the court said, jurors in the case had said that they had not made up their minds about the defendant’s guilt, and that is sufficient, the court said. The ruling in the case (Mu’Min vs. Virginia, 90-5193), upholds a death sentence in the murder of a suburban Washington woman.

* Said that prosecutors may be sued for giving bad legal advice to the police (Burns vs. Reed, 89-1715). But prosecutors are immune from liability for anything they say in court, including giving false statements. The 9-0 decision revives an Indiana woman’s suit against a prosecutor who advised police to hypnotize her to see if she shot her children.

* Said that public employee unions may not charge dissident members for the costs of political activities such as lobbying a Legislature (Lehnert vs. Ferris Faculty Assn., 89-1217). However, these members may be forced to pay their share of the costs of operating state and national affiliates, the court ruled.