Court offers far-reaching search decision
WASHINGTON (AP) – In a decision that could aid the government’s anti-terrorism efforts, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that police can question passengers on buses and trains and search for evidence without informing them that they can refuse. Officers routinely check buses and trains for drug couriers. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, they also have focused efforts on possible terrorists who could be using public transportation.
Police in Tallahassee, Fla., were within their rights to move up the aisle of a Greyhound bus, asking questions of each passenger and, in the case of two men wearing heavy clothing on a warm day, asking permission to search their luggage and bodies, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3.
The officers found bricks of cocaine strapped to the men’s legs, and they were later convicted on drug charges.
The question for the court was whether Christopher Drayton and Clifton Brown were coerced into cooperating with police, who did not tell them they had the right to refuse. The Constitution guarantees freedom from “unreasonable searches or seizures.”
The men agreed to the search, and nothing about the fact that they were seated on a bus forced them to say yes, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the court.
“Police officers act in full accord with the law when they ask citizens for consent. It reinforces the rule of law for the citizen to advise the police of his or her wishes and for the police to act in reliance on that understanding. When this exchange takes place, it dispels inferences of coercion.”
Kennedy was joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer.
Lawyers for the men argued that with two officers standing in the aisle and another posted by the front door, the men felt boxed into their seats and unable to either refuse to answer questions or get up and leave the bus.
Writing for the minority, Justice David H. Souter agreed.
“It is very hard to believe that either Brown or Drayton would have believed that he stood to lose nothing if he refused to cooperate with the police, or that he had any free choice to ignore the police altogether,” Souter wrote.
“No reasonable passenger could have believed that, only an uncomprehending one.”
Souter, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said bus travel is not the same as airline travel, in which passengers routinely submit to searches of their belonging without a police warrant and without any individual suspicion that they have anything to hide.
“It is universally accepted that such intrusions are necessary to hedge against risks that, nowadays, even small children understand,” Souter wrote. “The commonplace precautions of air travel have not, thus far, been justified for ground transportation however,” he noted.
The court majority reversed an appeals court ruling in the men’s favor.
Without mentioning the Sept. 11 airliner hijackings specifically, administration officials invoked the war on terrorism and the concern over aviation security in appealing the case to the Supreme Court.
“Programs that rely on consensual interactions between police officers and citizens on means of public transportation are an important part of the national effort to combat the flow of illegal narcotics and weapons,” Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote.
“In the current environment, they may also become an important part of preventing other forms of criminal activity that involve travel on the nation’s system of public transportation,” he added.
The court majority did not address the antiterrorism argument directly, but Kennedy wrote, “Bus passengers answer officers’ questions and otherwise cooperate not because of coercion but because the passengers know that their participation enhances their own safety and the safety of those around them.”
John Wesley Hall, a specialist in search and seizure cases who sits on the board of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, predicted police will use the case to justify searches far beyond the confines of public transportation.
“It will show up everywhere – in car searches, house searches,” Hall said.
The case is United States v. Drayton, 01-631.