High Court Expands Police Power in Traffic Searches

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled that a police officer who stops a car and has reason to suspect that it contains illegal drugs or guns may search everything in the vehicle, including a passenger’s belongings.

The 6-3 vote narrowed the distinction between drivers and their passengers, continuing the trend toward giving police greater authority to search motorists and their cars.

“We hold that police officers with probable cause to search a car may inspect passengers’ belongings found in the car that are capable of concealing the object of the search,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.

Monday’s decision concerned only purses, bags and other belongings, the court stressed. Officers cannot search the passengers themselves and check their pockets, the justices said, reaffirming a 1948 ruling.

Nevertheless, defense lawyers said they were outraged. Denver attorney Larry S. Pozner, president of the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said:

“We’re becoming a police state. This ruling tells the police that when they pull over a car to investigate a driver, they can search [the belongings of] any one of us in the vehicle for any reason or no reason whatsoever.”

But Robert Scully, executive director of the National Assn. of Police Organizations, praised the court “for giving officers the tools they need to do their jobs. Officers must be free of unreasonable, confusing and unworkable restrictions on what may be searched.”

Legal experts who have tracked the court’s cases on car searches said that the ruling was more of a clarification than a bold departure. The scope of police power to search inside a stopped car has been fought out in a series of cases over the last 20 years.

“All these decisions basically say that once you get in your car, you are fair game,” said Boston University law Professor Tracey Maclin. But Monday’s ruling “is significant,” he added, “because it affects potentially millions of people.”

For decades, the court has said that, once persons leave home and go onto the highways, they have a diminished right to privacy. To maintain safety on the roads, police have nearly unchecked power to stop and question motorists, the court has said.

The officer needs something beyond a mere traffic violation to justify a full-fledged search of the car, the court has said.

If, for example, the motorist appears to be drunk or on drugs, or is believed to be carrying a concealed weapon, the officer can search “every part of the vehicle and its contents,” the court has said in the past.

Until Monday, however, it had been unclear whether this power to search widely extended to the personal belongings of a presumably innocent passenger.

The issue came before the court when state judges in Wyoming threw out drug evidence found in the purse of Sandra Houghton, a passenger in a car driven by a man who had a syringe sticking out of his front pocket. The search of Houghton’s purse violated the 4th Amendment, the Wyoming Supreme Court said, because police had no reason to suspect her of wrongdoing.

Monday’s ruling reversed that decision.

It would be confusing for the police and for local judges, Scalia said, if a national rule were set that allowed searches of some containers in cars, but not others, depending who claimed them. “One would expect passenger-confederates to claim everything as their own,” he said, prompting a “bog of litigation” to resolve whether the officers acted correctly.

In previous rulings, the court has said that police need a specific reason to justify searching inside a car. In a December ruling, police were told that a routine traffic violation is not enough to trigger a full-blown vehicle search.

Iowa police maintained that they could routinely inspect the inside of a car whenever they stopped a motorist, even if they had no reason to suspect him or her of wrongdoing.

The high court rejected that policy as unconstitutional and stressed that officers must have a specific reason for looking under a car’s seats and in the glove compartment.

Officers are free to look into the car with a flashlight, the court said, and they may order passengers out of a vehicle to make sure they are not carrying weapons. They may also ask drivers to consent to a full search. Surprisingly, defense lawyers said, many persons consent, even when they have drugs hidden in the car.

Still, if the officers lack consent or a reason to suspect other wrongdoing, a “full-blown search of an automobile” is not justified, the court said in its December ruling in Knowles vs. Iowa. That decision overturned a marijuana conviction against Patrick Knowles, who was stopped for speeding in the town of Newton, Iowa.

By contrast, the Wyoming case decided Monday involved a traffic stop in which the motorist, David Young, had a hypodermic syringe sticking out of his shirt pocket.

The officer asked why he had the syringe. “With refreshing candor, Young replied he had used it to take drugs,” Scalia wrote.

That in turn prompted the officers to search his car and his two passengers, including Houghton. She had a syringe and methamphetamines in her purse.

She was convicted of a drug felony and served two years in prison before the state Supreme Court ruled the search of her purse illegal.

In dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, faulted the majority for abandoning “settled distinction between drivers and their passengers.”