Supreme Court Weakens Rule on Excluding Evidence : Law: Justices say that the ban on the use of the fruits of illegal searches should just apply to the property owner, not to co-defendants.

The Supreme Court weakened the so-called “exclusionary rule” in big drug cases Monday and ruled that an illegal search of one suspect does not justify suppressing evidence against his co-conspirators.

The ruling will make it easier to prosecute criminal conspiracies on the West Coast. The justices threw out a rule adopted by the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals which required judges to suppress all the evidence that grew out of an illegal search of one suspect.

That rule, prosecutors said, can permit a drug kingpin to go free because the police erred when arresting a low-level drug courier.

In a 9-0 ruling, the high court said that the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” protects only a person whose privacy has been invaded, not all those whose property has been seized.

“The established principle is that suppression of the product of a Fourth Amendment violation can be successfully urged only by those whose rights were violated by the search itself,” the justices said, citing a 1969 decision.

Under the exclusionary rule, a criminal defendant can seek to exclude from his trial any evidence that has been seized illegally. But in Monday’s decision, the justices said that “co-conspirators and co-defendants” cannot invoke that rule unless they were illegally searched or had their property illegally seized.

The decision is consistent with rulings over the last decade in which the more conservative court has cut back on broad interpretations of defendant’s rights.

According to government prosecutors, the 9th Circuit stood alone in ruling that all the participants in a “joint criminal venture” could block the use of illegally seized evidence. Its jurisdiction covers California, Alaska, Arizona, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.

The case before the court began on Sept. 26, 1989, when an Arizona highway patrol officer saw a Cadillac on Interstate 10 suddenly slow from 70 m.p.h. to 50 m.p.h. The behavior prompted him to stop the car.

The driver, Luis Arciniega, gave him permission to search the trunk. There the officer found 560 pounds of cocaine. With the driver’s cooperation, police were led to Xavier Padilla, believed to be the leader of a cocaine ring, and Donald Simpson, a U.S. Customs agent who owned the Cadillac.

When the case went before U.S. District Judge Richard Bilby in Tempe, he ruled that the patrol officer did not have reasonable grounds for stopping the Cadillac. Then, invoking the 9th Circuit rule, he suppressed the drug evidence against Padilla, Simpson and the other members of the alleged drug ring. On appeal, the 9th Circuit affirmed that decision last year.

In a six-page opinion in the case (United States vs. Padilla, 92-207), the Supreme Court said that the appeals court had erred in formulating its protection for “co-conspirators.” But it did not rule out the possibility that some of the evidence in this case may be suppressed.

The case was sent back to the lower courts to consider whether any defendant had a “property interest” that was violated by the illegal search or a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in the seized material.

Former U.S. Solicitor General Kenneth W. Starr, who brought the case to the high court, called the ruling a significant victory for the government.

“This was an act of surgery that gets rid of a rule that made no sense,” Starr said.

But Rick Jones, a Tucson attorney for Padilla, said that he did not view the decision as a total loss. “We think we can still prevail,” he said, when the case returns to the lower courts.

In other rulings, the high court:

* Gave federal housing officials the power to reduce the subsidies paid to private owners of low-income housing. Acting on suits filed by property owners in Los Angeles and Seattle, a federal appeals court had ruled that government could not recalculate its housing subsidies. But in a 9-0 ruling in the case (Cisneros vs. Alpine Ridge Group, 92-551), the justices said that federal law permits a change in the subsidies to keep the payments consistent with local rents.

* Gave state and local governments more power to negotiate how they will pay employees for overtime (Moreau vs. Klevenhagen, 92-1). The ruling will affect 10 states, not including California, that bar collective bargaining with public employees.

* Made it harder for companies to win damages from competitors they contend tried to harass them with a phony lawsuit (Professional Real Estate Investors vs. Columbia Pictures, 91-1043). Courts may award damages only when a lawsuit is so “objectively baseless” that no reasonable person could expect to win it, the court said.