High Court Sets High Bar as Term Begins

The Supreme Court, showing little interest in the issue of racial profiling, refused Monday to hear a challenge to a small New York town’s decision to stop and question every young black man in the area as police looked for a crime suspect who was black.

The court also turned away a job bias claim from a Muslim woman who says her boss at a rental car agency told her she could not wear a full head scarf while serving customers. She later quit and sued the company for discrimination based on her religion.

The two cases were among more than 1,800 the court dismissed as it opened its new term.

Since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, President Bush and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, among others, have been quick to say that racial profiling and religious discrimination are wrong and should not be tolerated.

But the Supreme Court has steered clear of those issues for the past decade. The justices have not issued a single ruling on racial profiling or seized a chance to clarify the line between legitimate police searches and unconstitutional racial discrimination.

They have, however, set a high bar for those who claim they are victims of racial or religious bias by the government.

Five years ago, the justices ruled that a police officer’s true motive for stopping a motorist was irrelevant. If a driver commits even a trivial violation, such as failing to fully stop at a stop sign, police officers may pull over his car. The justices also rejected a bias claim from several young black men who were pulled over for pausing too long at a stop sign.

Also in 1996, the court ruled that plaintiffs in race bias cases need actual proof, not just a statistical pattern, before they can bring a claim of unequal treatment against police and prosecutors. A public defender in Los Angeles had challenged federal prosecutors after she learned that every defendant charged with crack cocaine dealing one year was black. The high court squelched the lawsuit at the pretrial stage because she had no proof of deliberate racial bias.

When combined, the two rulings closed the courthouse doors to most claims of racial bias.

Still, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union hoped the Supreme Court would take up the Oneonta, N.Y., case to outlaw the use of “dragnet sweeps” that are based on race.

In September 1992, a 77-year-old woman told police she was awakened by a young, knife-wielding black man. She also said he suffered a cut on his arm during the attack.

In response, police checked local hospitals for a young black man who had been cut, and then decided to question all the black students at the nearby state university campus. Failing to turn up a suspect, they extended the targeted questioning to others in the area, confronting a total of 450 black men.

No suspect was arrested in the case, and then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and other officials later apologized for the search.

A group of 35 black plaintiffs sued the city and its Police Department, alleging that they were targeted based on their race in violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

But the federal appeals court in New York dismissed the suit before a trial. These young men “were not questioned solely on the basis of their race,” wrote Judge John Walker of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. “They were questioned on the altogether legitimate basis of a physical description given by the victim of the crime.”

The lower court left open the possibility that some of the men could claim they were victims of an unreasonable search in violation of the 4th Amendment.

ACLU lawyers appealed to the high court, arguing that the Constitution does not allow police to “target for questioning and physical examination the entire minority community” based on a single fact about a single suspect. But the court denied the appeal Monday in Brown vs. City of Oneonta, 00-1728.

The ACLU’s national legal director, Steven R. Shapiro, said he was not discouraged by the court’s action.

“It’s probably a mistake to read too much into this,” he said, adding that the justices may have rejected the appeal now because part of the lawsuit remains unresolved.

“The issue was whether this was a form of racial guilt by association,” he said. “And I honestly believe, if presented with the right case, the court will say that.”

The case involving the head scarf began in 1996, when Zeinab Ali, a native of Somalia, was hired at a rental car office in Arlington, Va. A devout Muslim, Ali believed she must keep her head covered in the presence of men who were not members of her family.

But a new supervisor told her she could not wear a full head scarf around customers. When Ali persisted, he transferred her to another job where she had little contact with the public.

Federal law forbids employers from discriminating against workers based on their religion. However, a lower court tossed out Ali’s claim because she could not show that she suffered a financial loss because of the discrimination.

When she appealed to the Supreme Court, she was joined by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and four Jewish groups. Lawyers for the American Jewish Congress said employees wearing religious garb should not “be banished to the workplace equivalent of the back of the bus.”

But the justices turned away the appeal in Ali vs. Alamo Rent-a-Car, 00-1813.

Court officials, meanwhile, handed out a thick list of orders in several thousand appeals and motions. Among them, the court:

* Turned down the claim of Terry L. Nichols, the co-defendant in the Oklahoma City bombing, that he deserves a new trial because the FBI belatedly turned over some files on the investigation (Nichols vs. U.S., 01-8900).

* Asked Solicitor Gen. Theodore Olson to weigh in on a California law that seeks to obtain information on European insurance policies that may have been sold to Holocaust victims between 1920 and 1945. A coalition of insurers is challenging the law on the grounds that only the federal government, not a state, can impose regulations on overseas firms.

State lawyers say the firms involved operate in California. Olson will be expected to file a brief in a few months arguing why the court should, or should not, hear the case. (American Insurance Assn. vs. Low, 00-1926.)

* Refused to hear a challenge from environmentalists who sought to block development in the Ballona Wetlands near Venice. They maintained that the Army Corps of Engineers should not have cleared development in one of few wetlands areas along the Southern California coast. (Wetlands Action Network vs. Army Corps of Engineers, 00-1692)

* Told a lower court in Georgia to reconsider a $340-million punitive damage verdict against Time Warner Entertainment in 1998 that grew out of alleged mismanagement at an amusement park. In May, the justices ruled that appeals courts must skeptically examine large punitive damages verdicts. In a brief order, the justices overturned the lower court’s judgment and said it should take another look at the issue. (Time Warner vs. Six Flags, 00-1875)