- WASHINGTON - The Supreme
Court ruled Tuesday that police may set up roadblocks to collect tips about
crimes, rejecting concerns that authorities might use the checkpoints to
fish for unrelated suspicious activity.
-
- The 6-3 decision allows officers to block traffic and
ask motorists for help in solving crimes. Critics have complained that
authorities might misuse the power, disguising dragnets as ''informational
checkpoints.''
-
- Roadblocks are used for a variety of investigations.
For example, in 2002 police used them to try to produce leads in the Elizabeth
Smart kidnapping in Utah and the sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C.,
area.
-
- But the Supreme Court has limited their use.
-
- Although the justices have allowed random sobriety checkpoints
to detect drunken drivers and border roadblocks to intercept illegal immigrants,
they ruled in 2000 that roadblocks intended for drug searches are an unreasonable
invasion of privacy under the Constitution.
-
- In Tuesday's decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said that
short stops, ''a very few minutes at most,'' are not too intrusive on motorists,
considering the value in crime-solving. Police may hand out fliers or ask
drivers to volunteer information, he said.
-
- In a partial dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens, David
H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned whether random roadblocks
yield any useful tips. The delays ''may seem relatively innocuous to some,
but annoying to others ... still other drivers may find an unpublicized
roadblock at midnight on a Saturday somewhat alarming,'' Stevens wrote
for the three.
-
- The constitutionality of the informational roadblocks
was challenged by Robert Lidster, accused of drunken driving at a 1997
checkpoint set up to get tips about an unrelated fatal hit-and-run accident.
The roadblock was at the same spot and time of night that the hit-and-run
took place about a week earlier.
-
- Authorities in Lombard, Ill., got no helpful tips that
night in the death of a 70-year-old bicyclist, but they arrested Lidster
after police said he nearly hit an officer with his minivan.
-
- Lidster argued that police could have used other methods
to get information about the hit-and-run driver, like billboards or stories
in newspapers and on radio and television stations. Television coverage
of the roadblock did lead to information that helped solve the case.
-
- Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said the Supreme
Court's ruling ''will allow law enforcement in Illinois and across the
nation to seek voluntary assistance from citizens in their efforts to solve
crime.''
-
- But criminal defense lawyers and civil liberties groups
questioned whether the decision would lead to abuse by officers.
-
- ''I would hope this wouldn't be an excuse for them to
engage in willy-nilly roadblocks,'' said San Antonio, Texas, attorney Gerald
Goldstein, former president of National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers. ''We're taking the officers at their word that they're looking
for information and not looking at the occupants.''
-
- Ronald Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University,
said the decision gives police ''another reason to create a roadblock and
to pull people over.''
-
- Breyer predicted the ruling would not lead to widespread
roadblocks because of limited police funding and community hostility to
traffic delays.
-
- Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg agreed with the court's
rationale that informational checkpoints are different from roadblocks
intended to search for evidence of wrongdoing by the occupants of car.
But they wanted a lower court to reconsider whether the stop outside Chicago
was reasonable.
-
- Stevens said motorists will be trapped by the checkpoints.
-
- ''In contrast to pedestrians, who are free to keep walking
when they encounter police officers handing out fliers or seeking information,
motorists who confront a roadblock are required to stop, and to remain
stopped for as long as the officers choose to detain them,'' he wrote.
-
- Illinois was supported in the case by more than 20 other
states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana,
Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma,
Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont
and Virginia.
-
- The case is Illinois v. Lidster, 02-1060.
|
