Indianapolis, et al. v. Edmond, James (11/28/2000)

By: Jennifer Morrill, Medill News Service

Questions presented

Are checkpoints at which law enforcement officers briefly stop vehicular traffic, check motorists' licenses and vehicle registrations, look for signs of impairment, and walk narcotics detection dog around the exterior of each stopped automobile unlawful under the 4th Amendment?

Brief

On six separate occasions between August and November of 1998, the Indianapolis Police Department set up roadblocks on city streets to capture drug offenders.

At the checkpoints, which were located throughout the city, drivers of approximately 1,161 cars were stopped and asked to provide one officer their licenses and registration. At the same time, a second officer peered through the windows and lead a drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle. If the dog smelled drugs, the car would be searched.

Each car was detained for approximately five minutes, unless a search was conducted.

Indianapolis' program resulted in 55 drug-related arrests, or a 5 percent hit rate. The roadblocks also resulted in 49 arrests unrelated to drugs, such as driving with expired licenses, making an overall hit rate of 9 percent.

After James Edmond and Joell Palmer were stopped at one of the city's roadblocks, (date), they garnered the support of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) and challenged the search in federal court as a violation of their 4th Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.

The city contended it had the right to use drug roadblocks to enforce the law and keep drug traffickers out of Indianapolis.

U.S. District Judge Sarah Evans Barker upheld the city's drug roadblock program, finding that the checkpoints designed to sniff out suspects transporting narcotics didn't violate the Constitution.

By a 2-1 vote, a 7th Circuit Court of Appeals panel reversed, finding fault with the reasons Indianapolis gave for justifying its drug roadblock program.

""Indianapolis does not claim to be concerned with protecting highway safety against drivers high on drugs,"" wrote Judge Richard Posner. ""Its program of drug roadblocks belongs to the genre of general programs of surveillance which invade privacy wholesale in order to discover evidence of crime.""

Posner conceded that the majority was ""not enthusiastic about the use of the Constitution to squelch experiments in dealing with serious social problems,"" but he also observed that the roadblock program was not a law enforcement imperative.

""When urgent considerations of the public safety require compromise with the normal principles constraining law enforcement, the normal principles may have to bend,"" Posner wrote. ""The Constitution is not a suicide pact. But no such urgency has been shown here.""

The majority identified four situations in which a random search might be constitutional:1. A roadblock set up to catch a fleeing criminal, where there is a suspect--the police have identified the criminal and have only to find him--but it is infeasible to avoid an indiscriminate search of others.2. A hypothetical dynamite case, where no specific person is under suspicion but the circumstances make it impossible to prevent a crime without an indiscriminate search.3. A regulatory search, the objective of which is to protect a specific activity rather than to operate as an adjunct to general criminal law enforcement.4. The prevention of illegal importation of people or goods.

Indianapolis' program fell into none of the exceptions, the majority found.

""The legality of drug roadblocks has divided the other courts that have been asked to decided the issue,"" Posner wrote. ""But here the roadblock is meant to intercept a completely random sample of drivers; there is neither probable cause nor articulable suspicion to stop any given driver.""

In dissent, Judge Frank Easterbrook asked, ""Why should the constitutionality of a roadblock program turn on what its promoters think (or the order in which its components were approved), rather than on what happens to the citizenry? Over and over, the Supreme Court says that the reasonableness inquiry under the fourth amendment is objective; it depends on what the police do, not on what they want or think.""

In arguing that the court should have allowed the roadblock program, Judge Easterbrook criticized the whole landscape of 4th Amendment law, saying it is ""not a model of intellectual consistency,"" and one in which ""cases create oodles of cubbyholes.""

""One glory of a federal society is that the people may choose for themselves not only laws but also law-enforcement methods,"" Judge Easterbrook wrote. ""Indianapolis selected a roadblock system, one that may catch any of its drivers. If this strikes the wrong balance, the people may throw out of office those who adopted it. Given the modest intrusion that roadblocks create for personal privacy, this is a legitimate choice for the public to make.""

On Feb. 22, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari in the case. On Aug. 28, the Court allowed the U.S. Solicitor General to participate in oral arguments as amicus in the case.

On Nov. 28, 2000, the Court, by a 6-3 vote, affirmed, holding that because the checkpoint program's primary purpose is indistinguishable from the general interest in crime control, the checkpoints violate the 4th Amendment.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Sandra Day O' Connor. In dissent were Chief Justice William, and Justice Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.