COPS O.K. TO SEARCH CAR PASSENGERS' BELONGINGS, U.S. SUPREME COURT SAYS
MONDAY

In a decision that helps further cement a broad interpretation of
officers' search powers and strongly supports the principles of Criminal
Patrol, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled yesterday (Monday, 4/5/99) that you
have the right to search the belongings of all passengers--without consent
or a warrant--in a car you have stopped if you have probable cause to
believe that illegal contraband may be hidden in the car and believe that
the contraband could be hidden in those belongings.

The case, Wyoming v. Houghton, directly relates to Chpt. 6 in Calibre
Press's bestseller "Tactics for Criminal Patrol," specifically pg. 222
where we discuss voluntary searches and who has the authority to give
consent to search passengers' possessions and pg. 232 where we discuss
probable cause and involuntary searches.

The Wyoming case began in the early morning hours of July 23, 1995 when a
Wyoming Highway Patrol trooper stopped a car driven by David Young for
speeding and driving with a broken brake light. Young's girlfriend and
another friend, Sandra Houghton, were sitting in the front seat with him.

When the officer approached the driver's side window and started to
question Young, he noticed a syringe sticking out of Young's front shirt
pocket. The officer left the 3 people in their car under the watch of 2
backup troopers and returned to his patrol unit to get his protective
gloves.

When he returned to Young's car, he ordered the driver to get out and told
him to put the syringe on the hood. When the trooper asked Young why he
had the syringe, Young told him--with surprising honesty--that he used it
to take drugs.

With this, the backup troopers told the 2 female passengers to get out of
the car and asked them for I.D. Houghton told the troopers that her name
was Sandra James and claimed that she didn't have any I.D. with her.

Meanwhile, after finding the syringe and hearing Young's confession, the
trooper who stopped the car searched its interior. He found a purse in the
back seat which Houghton claimed was hers. The trooper reached inside the
purse and took out a wallet which contained her driver's license that gave
up her real identity. When the trooper asked her why she had lied about
her name, she answered, "In case things went bad."

The trooper continued searching Houghton's purse and found a brown pouch
and a black wallet inside. Houghton told the trooper that the brown
pouch, which contained drug paraphernalia and a syringe filled with 60 ccs
of methamphetamine (a felony-level amount), wasn't hers and she claimed
she had no idea how it got into her purse. She did, however, claim
ownership of the black wallet which contained drug paraphernalia and a
syringe filled with 10 ccs of meth (a misdemeanor amount). The trooper
also found fresh needle tracks on Houghton's arm.

She was charged with felony possession of meth and arrested.

During her state court trial, Houghton moved to suppress all evidence
found in her purse, claiming that searching the purse violated her Fourth
and Fourteenth Amendment rights. But the court denied her motion holding
that the trooper had probable cause to search Young's car for contraband,
"and, by extension, any containers therein that could hold such
contraband."

A jury convicted Houghton on the felony possession charge.

Houghton appealed to the Wyoming Supreme Court and it reversed her
conviction, saying, "Generally, once probable cause is established to
search a vehicle, an officer is entitled to search all containers therein
which may contain the object of the search. However," the court continued,
"if the officer knows or should know that a container is the personal
effect of a passenger who is not suspected of criminal activity, then the
container is outside the scope of the search unless someone had the
opportunity to conceal the contraband within the personal effect to avoid
detection."

The court ruled that the trooper who searched her purse had in fact
violated her Constitutional rights because he "knew or should have known
that the purse did not belong to the driver" and "there was no probable
cause to search the passengers' personal effects and no reason to believe
that contraband had been placed in the purse."

Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the state supreme court's
ruling and reinstated Houghton's conviction, confirming your right to
search all containers inside a car's passenger compartment, regardless of
ownership, with probable cause to do so.

"[Passengers in a car], no less than drivers, possess a reduced
expectation of privacy with regard to the property they transport in
cars," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia. "Whereas the passenger's privacy
expectations are considerably diminished, the governmental interests at
stake are substantial. Effective law enforcement would be appreciably
impaired without the ability to search a passenger's personal belongings
when there is reason to believe contraband or evidence of criminal
wrongdoing is hidden in the car. The sensible rule...is that such a
package [Houghton's purse, in this instance] may be searched, whether or
not its owner is present as a passenger or otherwise, because it may
contain the contraband that the officer has reason to believe is in the
car."

The Court based much of yesterday's decision on an earlier decision
(United States v. Ross, 456 U.S. 798) that in summary ruled, "If probable
cause justifies the search of a lawfully stopped vehicle, it justifies the
search of every part of the vehicle and its contents that may conceal the
object of the search."

Further, the Supreme Court reiterated that in other cases it has ruled
that the Ross decision "applies broadly to all containers within a car,
without qualification as to ownership."

When presenting yesterday's decision, Scalia pointed out that vehicle
passengers "will often be engaged in a common enterprise with the driver,
and have the same interest in concealing the fruits or the evidence of
their wrongdoing."

Further, Scalia wrote, "A criminal might be able to hide contraband in a
passenger's belongings as readily as in other containers in the
car--perhaps even surreptitiously, without the passenger's knowledge or
permission.

"To be sure, these factors favoring a search will not always be present,"
he continued, "but the balancing of interests must be conducted with an
eye to the generality of cases. To require that the investigating officer
have positive reason to believe that the passenger and driver were engaged
in a common enterprise, or positive reason to believe that the driver had
time and occasion to conceal the item in the passenger's belongings,
surreptitiously or with friendly permission, is to impose requirements so
seldom met that a 'passenger's property' rule would dramatically reduce
the ability to find and seize contraband and evidence of crime.

"Once a 'passenger's property' exception to car searches became widely
known," the Court predicted, "one would expect passenger-confederates to
claim everything as their own. And one would anticipate a bog of
litigation--in the form of both civil lawsuits and motions to suppress in
criminal trials--involving such questions as whether the officer should
have believed a passenger's claim of ownership, whether he should have
inferred ownership from various objective factors, whether he had probable
cause to believe that the passenger was a confederate, or to believe that
the driver might have introduced the contraband into the package with or
without the passenger's knowledge.

"When balancing the competing interests, our determinations of
'reasonableness' under the Fourth Amendment must take account of these
practical realities. We think they mitigate in favor of the needs of law
enforcement, and against a personal-privacy interest that is ordinarily
weak."

The court also made clear that searching a passenger's belongings is much
different and far less invasive than body searches and searches of outer
clothing which, "constitutes a severe, though brief, intrusion upon
cherished personal security, and it must surely be an annoying,
frightening, and perhaps humiliating experience. Such traumatic
consequences," the court said, "are not to be expected when the police
examine an item of personal property found in a car."

In his concurring opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer made clear that this
decision "applies only to automobile searches" and applies "only to
containers found within automobiles and it does not extend to the search
of a person found in that automobile."

Justice John Paul Stevens, one of 3 dissenting judges, voiced concern that
the ruling may have expanded vehicle search boundaries too far, citing
that given this ruling, police might be able to search a taxi passenger's
belongings if they believe that the driver had a syringe hidden in the
vehicle somewhere. "Today," wrote Stevens, "instead of adhering to the
settled distinction between drivers and passengers, the court fashions a
new rule. I think it's quite plain that the search if a passenger's purse
or briefcase involves an intrusion on privacy."