CDR: On 60 inches tonight, damn you all

[George at Orwellian.Org]

http://foxnews.com/national/court/scotus_roadblocks.sml
#    
#    Drug Checkpoints Struck Down by High Court
#    
#    Tuesday, November 28, 2000
#    
#    In a divided 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court on Monday struck down 
#    as unconstitutional random roadblocks intended to catch criminals 
#    trafficking drugs.
#    
#    The ruling weighed privacy rights against the interests of law 
#    enforcement and found that Indianapolis' use of drug-sniffing 
#    dogs to check all cars pulled over at the roadblocks was an 
#    unreasonable search under the Constitution.
#    
#    The majority, in an opinion written by Justice Sandra Day 
#    O'Connor, said the ruling does not affect other kinds of police 
#    roadblocks such as border checks and drunken-driving checkpoints. 
#    Those have already been found constitutional.
#    
#    But the reasoning behind those kinds of roadblocks - chiefly 
#    that the benefit to the public outweighs the inconvenience - 
#    cannot be applied broadly, O'Connor wrote.
#    
#    "If this case were to rest on such a high level of generality, 
#    there would be little check on the authorities' ability to 
#    construct roadblocks for almost any conceivable law enforcement 
#    purpose," the opinion said.
#    
#    The three dissenters were the court's most conservative justices: 
#    Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and 
#    Clarence Thomas.
#    
#    Lawyers for Indianapolis conceded that the roadblocks erected 
#    there in 1998 detained far more innocent motorists than criminals.
#    
#    The city said its primary aim was to catch drug criminals. Civil 
#    liberties advocates called the practice heavy-handed and risky, 
#    and asked the Supreme Court to ban it.
#    
#    Law enforcement in and of itself is not a good enough reason 
#    to stop innocent motorists, the majority ruling concluded.
#    
#    The court was not swayed by the argument that the severity of 
#    the drug problem in some city neighborhoods justified the 
#    searches.
#    
#    "While we do not limit the purposes that may justify a checkpoint 
#    program to any rigid set of categories, we decline to approve 
#    a program whose primary purpose is ultimately indistinguishable 
#    from the general interest in crime control," the majority opinion 
#    said.
#    
#    Cars were pulled over at random in high-crime neighborhoods in 
#    Indianapolis, motorists questioned, and a drug-sniffing dog led 
#    around the cars. Most motorists were detained for about three 
#    minutes.
#    
#    The city conducted six roadblocks over four months in 1998 before 
#    the practice was challenged in federal court.
#    
#    Police stopped 1,161 cars and trucks and made 104 arrests. 
#    Fifty-five of the arrests were on drug charges.