Court Says Fourth Amendment Allows ‘Informational’ Stops
By Charles Lane, The Washington Post
The Supreme Court gave its conditional approval yesterday to “informational checkpoints” on the nation’s streets, ruling that police may briefly stop traffic to inform vehicle occupants of a recent crime and ask if they have any information about it.
All nine justices agreed that when such roadblocks serve a public interest important enough to outweigh the loss of freedom by motorists, they are permissible under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable detention.
“The Fourth Amendment does not treat a motorist’s car as his castle,” Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the court. “And special law enforcement concerns will sometimes justify highway stops without individualized suspicion.”
The court’s ruling should make it easier for police to employ a tactic that has come into play in situations including the search for kidnapping victim Elizabeth Smart and airport security operations during “code orange” terrorist alerts.
In the past, the Supreme Court has approved checkpoints for such special purposes as checking for drunk drivers or hunting contraband near U.S. borders. But in 2000, the court invalidated police checkpoints in Indianapolis at which officers stopped cars at random and searched them for drugs using sniffer dogs. In that case, the court held that “the ordinary enterprise of investigating crimes” was not sufficient justification.
Yesterday’s decision narrowed the scope of the 2000 ruling. The checkpoint approved was different from the one in Indianapolis, Breyer wrote, because “police expected the information elicited to help them apprehend not the vehicle’s occupants, but other individuals.”
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan hailed the decision as “a significant one that will allow law enforcement in Illinois and across the nation to seek voluntary assistance from citizens in their efforts to solve crime.”
But Gerald Goldstein, past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which had supported the motorist who filed the appeal, called it “yet another in the continuing slow but tortuous encroachment on the citizen’s expectation of privacy.”
Legal analysts said a ruling limiting the Indianapolis precedent could affect a current case on mandatory DNA testing of former federal prisoners. A 2000 federal law required federal parolees to give blood samples so authorities could keep their DNA profiles on record. But in October, a San Francisco-based federal appeals court, citing the Indianapolis case, said the law violates the Fourth Amendment. That ruling is now on appeal to a larger panel of the same court.
The case decided yesterday, Illinois v. Lidster, No. 02-1060, arose from the 1997 drunken-driving conviction of Robert S. Lidster, whom police stopped at an informational checkpoint in Lombard, Ill. The police were passing out fliers and asking for help in finding the perpetrator of a fatal hit-and-run at the same site a week earlier; Lidster nearly hit an officer with his car and smelled of alcohol.
Lidster appealed his case all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court, which struck down the checkpoints by a vote of 4 to 3. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the Indianapolis case, the Illinois court said it did not want to “make roadblocks ‘a routine part of American life.’ ”
Breyer, however, wrote that the Lombard checkpoint was indeed reasonable, and thus constitutional -- given the circumstances police were operating under at the time.
Just after midnight on Aug. 23, 1997, a hit-and-run driver struck and killed a 70-year-old bicyclist on a highway.
Lombard police set up the checkpoint at the scene of the accident exactly one week after the incident, hoping that many of the same drivers, some of whom, like the victim, worked at a nearby post office, might be going by. Each person was stopped and questioned for 10 to 15 seconds and given a flier reading “Alert . . . Fatal hit & run accident” before moving on.
“The relevant public concern was grave,” Breyer wrote. “Police were investigating a crime that had resulted in a human death. . . . Most importantly, the stops interfered only minimally with liberty of the sort the Fourth Amendment seeks to protect.”
But three justices dissented from this portion of Breyer’s opinion. In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices John Paul Stevens and David H. Souter, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that she would have sent the case back to the Illinois state courts to give them a chance to analyze whether the Lombard checkpoint was reasonable under the circumstances.