High Court Says Police Checkpoints for Tips OK

In a victory for law enforcement, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police may set up roadblocks to seek motorists’ help in solving a recent crime.

The 6-3 decision is likely to encourage greater use of roadblocks to obtain tips from the public and to look for witnesses -- in hopes of learning, for example, who caused an accident, where to find a missing child or who committed a robbery or murder.

Until now, the legality of these roadblocks had been in doubt.

The high court in the past had upheld the use of sobriety checkpoints on the highways to detect and arrest drunk drivers. The court said this was a reasonable traffic safety measure.

But four years ago, the justices struck down the use of roadblocks as a means to search for drugs and drug dealers. In that case, police in Indianapolis were stopping all cars at roadblocks and using drug-sniffing dogs to detect narcotics. The high court described these stops as criminal searches, and ruled that the 4th Amendment does not permit the police to stop and search everyone in hopes of finding a criminal.

Tuesday’s decision dealt with what the government called “informational checkpoints.” The purpose of these roadblocks was to gather information rather than to make arrests.

The case at issue stemmed from an Aug. 30, 1997, incident in which police in Lombard, Ill., set up a checkpoint at the scene of a fatal hit-and-run accident. A week before, a motorist had struck a 70-year-old bicyclist.

As vehicles pulled up to the checkpoint, officers wearing reflective vests stopped each one for 10 to 15 seconds, gave the motorists a flier describing the time and place of the accident and asked for help in finding the driver.

One motorist, Robert Lidster, swerved and nearly drove into one of the officers. When he was pulled aside, an officer smelled alcohol, and Lidster failed a sobriety test. He was convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol.

When Lidster appealed, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed his conviction and ruled the roadblock was an unconstitutional search. Its decision cited the Indianapolis case ruling.

In Illinois vs. Lidster, the Supreme Court reversed the state court decision and upheld the use of these roadblocks as a reasonable means to gather information.

“The stop’s objective was to help find the perpetrator of a specific and known crime, not of unknown crimes of a general sort,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the court. “And each stop required only a brief wait in line -- a very few minutes at most.”

Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented in part, saying that whether such searches would yield useful information was “speculative at best.” They would have sent the case back to Illinois for a further hearing.