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ACLU Urges Supreme Court to Reaffirm Legal Limits of Police Search and Seizure Powers (2/22/2006)
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: media@aclu.org
WASHINGTON -- In a
case being argued today before the Supreme Court, the American Civil Liberties
Union urged the Justices to reject an appeals court ruling allowing police to
search parolees on the public streets without any reason to suspect wrongdoing.
“There are very limited instances when law enforcement can search
a person without specific suspicion,” said Steven R. Shapiro, Legal Director of
the ACLU, which filed a friend-of-the court brief in the case. “These limits
protect all Americans from being searched based on little besides the whim of
any officer.”
At issue in Samson v. California, No. 04-9728, is
whether the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment permits a police officer to search a
parolee on the public streets without any basis for suspicion. The ACLU
said that upholding such a search under the Court’s established “special needs”
doctrine “gives a blank check to police officers to conduct searches at their
will; this flies in the face of the Court’s emphasis on the importance of
minimizing the ability of officials to exercise discretion in an arbitrary
manner.”
Donald Samson, the defendant in today’s case, was stopped
and searched by a police officer on the public streets of San Bruno, California.
The police officer knew that Samson was on parole but had no basis to suspect
him of violating the law. Even assuming that parolees are subject to
suspicionless search by their parole officers (for instance, via a urine test),
the ACLU said the Court should not allow the same latitude to police officers
going about their general law enforcement duties.
Under the Fourth
Amendment, which protects people from unreasonable search and seizure, law
enforcement searches are only to be conducted when there is at minimum
individualized suspicion, and more likely probable cause and a warrant.
Exceptions to these requirements are called “special needs” and should only be
invoked when meeting probable cause criteria is deemed completely impractical.
Searches that have previously been upheld by the Justices have required that
entire groups be searched or that searches be conducted randomly.
“If there is one rule governing this Court’s special needs
jurisprudence, it is that government officers cannot have free rein to search
whomever they choose, whenever, they choose, for whatever reason they
choose,” Shapiro said. Citing the 2000 case of in City of Indianapolis v.
Edmond, in which the Justices rejected the Indiana state police's practice of
using roadblocks with drug-sniffing dogs, Shapiro noted that the Court has never
upheld a law enforcement search program “whose primary person was to detect
evidence of ordinary criminal wrongdoing.”
The Supreme Court has
found that some drug testing qualifies as a “special need” in instances when the
search is not a means to a law enforcement end, but seeks to guarantee safety at
schools, on the roads, or in the workplace. There are few other “special needs”
circumstances, and to date the Court has never applied the distinction to an
ordinary law enforcement situation in which the police target a specific
individual without any basis for suspicion.
“The bottom line is
that government cannot cut constitutional corners even in pursuit of a goal it
identifies as being for the public good,” said Graham Boyd, Director of the
ACLU’s Drug Policy Reform Project, which co-authored the ACLU’s brief in today’s
case.
The ACLU’s brief is online at www.aclu.org/scotus/2005/22835res20051213049728/22835res20051213.html
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