Mass Searches on Trains, Buses OKd by Justices

WASHINGTON —  In its latest ruling broadening the powers of police, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the mass search of passengers and their belongings on buses and trains, as long as officers receive a traveler’s consent before inspecting his bags.

Officers cannot threaten anyone into cooperating, the court said.

On a 6-3 vote, the justices ruled constitutional a relatively new and, some say, ominous tactic in the war on drugs. A lower court that had declared the searches illegal called them better suited to “totalitarian states.”

In the mid-1980s, in an aggressive move to stop drug trafficking on the East Coast, armed police officers in Broward County, Fla., began boarding interstate buses and trains at station stops. As they moved down the aisles, they asked to see the passengers’ tickets and identification. Then, they asked to look in their bags or luggage.

Last year, the Florida Supreme Court ruled such mass searches of presumably innocent persons to be unconstitutional. “This is not Hitler’s Berlin, nor Stalin’s Moscow, nor is it white supremacist South Africa,” where “badge-wielding police” can stop travelers at will, one Florida judge said.

But, in reversing that decision, the U.S. high court said such searches are constitutional as long as “a reasonable passenger would feel free” to say no to the police.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, writing for the court, said sweep searches may be “distasteful” but they do not violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on “unreasonable searches and seizures” because they do not involve the use of force by police.

Federal agents have been using similar search tactics to arrest drug traffickers on Amtrak trains.

Thursday’s Supreme Court outcome was no surprise to legal experts. In the five years since William H. Rehnquist became chief justice, the court has not ruled against the government in any significant case involving drugs or police searches.

Two years ago, the court, in a 5-4 vote, ruled that public employees in sensitive jobs may be required to undergo urine tests to detect drug use. Last year, also on a 5-4 vote, the court said police officers may randomly stop motorists at checkpoints to test their sobriety.

With the retirement of liberal Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and his replacement by David H. Souter, the margin in these cases has gone to 6 to 3 from 5 to 4.

The three dissenters in Thursday’s ruling--Justices Thurgood Marshall, Harry A. Blackmun and John Paul Stevens--chastised the majority for upholding “dragnet-style sweeps” of law-abiding travelers.

In her majority opinion, O’Connor characterized the ruling as a simple application of precedents that have evolved in recent decades.

For more than 20 years, the Supreme Court has made clear that policemen may stop and question persons on the streets, in airports or in any other public area. “We have repeatedly held that mere police questioning does not constitute a seizure,” she said.

The justices have struggled, however, to define when police officers cross the line separating a “consensual encounter” between an officer and a citizen and an unconstitutionally forced search or seizure.

The high court did not settle the matter Thursday. Instead, O’Connor restated the court’s rather vague standard, under which judges should consider the “totality of the circumstances” in deciding whether an illegal search or seizure has occurred.

Thursday’s decision stemmed from an incident on Aug. 27, 1985, when Terrance Bostick boarded a Greyhound bus in Miami en route to Atlanta. He was asleep in the back of the bus when two officers came aboard at a station in Ft. Lauderdale and began questioning passengers. They asked to speak to Bostick, looked at his ticket and driver’s license and then asked to search his bags.

“Go ahead,” Bostick said, according to the officers.

However, Bostick denies giving permission to search his bags, in which the officers found cocaine.

The Florida Supreme Court, ruling for Bostick, said such mass searches are unconstitutional because they are not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing by passengers and because the travelers are trapped in the confined quarters on the bus and thus cannot easily walk away from the officers.

The high court majority disagreed, ruling that mass searches in the “cramped confines” of a bus are not automatically illegal.

“Bostick’s movements were ‘confined’ in a sense, but this was the natural result of his decision to take the bus. It says nothing about whether or not the police conduct at issue was coercive,” O’Connor wrote in the case (Florida vs. Bostick, 89-1717).

The court sent the case back to a trial judge to reconsider the facts. If it could be shown that policemen used guns to intimidate travelers or insisted on their cooperation, the searches would be illegal, O’Connor said.

For Bostick, the outcome may depend on whether the judge believes him or the officers. Under the Miranda rule, police officers who take a suspect into custody must warn him of his rights and get a signed waiver with a confession.

But the high court has not required police officers to similarly warn suspects of their rights if they are not in custody.

LIBEL DECISION: High court rules that a writer who “deliberately or recklessly altered” quotes can be forced to pay damages for libel. A27