Highway Privacy

Spot checks are struck down

A patrol car appears in the driver's rearview mirror, and the flashing light goes on. The driver anxiously pulls over, and the policeman asks to see his license and registration. It is just a routine check; the driver has not been speeding or doing anything noticeably wrong. Then the officer glimpses the bag of marijuana ...

Such spot checks by police are common practice. Last week, by a vote of 8 to 1. the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that they are unconstitutional. No longer will police be able to stop a car at random to look at a driver's credentials unless the officer has some objective reason to suspect that the law has been broken. The case before the court involved a Delaware driver named William Prouse, 20, who was arrested on charges of possession of marijuana after his car was stopped during a "routine" license check in 1976. Police Officer Anthony Avena was not looking for drugs. "I saw the car in the area and was not answering any complaints so I decided to pull it off," he explained. The state argued that random checks contributed to highway safety by taking unlicensed drivers and unregistered cars off the road.

The court disagreed. Writing for the majority. Justice Byron White called the safety factor "marginal at best," and said it was not enough to outweigh the Fourth Amendment's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures. There is, said White, "a 'grave danger' of abuse of discretion." The decision means that police will no longer be able to use such dubious reasons as the length of a driver's hair or the color of his skin to stop a car. In the court's view, wrote White, random checks by policemen are "an unsettling show of authority"; people have as much reason to expect privacy from government intrusion in their cars, he added, as they do in their homes.

The decision still allows police to set up roadblocks for license and registration checks, which prompted a humorous dissent from Justice William Rehnquist. He said that, in his colleagues' eyes, motorists, "like sheep, are much less likely to be 'frightened' or 'annoyed' when stopped en masse." Therefore, police can now stop "all motorists," but not "less than all motorists." Rehnquist may have had a point about the court's logic, but then there is nothing logical about the genuine anxiety many innocent motorists feel when they see a police car pull up alongside.

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