High court ruling on vehicle searches will have little impact here

Thursday, Dec. 10, 1998 | 11:12 a.m.

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week forbidding police from searching cars routinely stopped for traffic violations without reasonable suspicion of a crime won't affect Nevadans much, because the state's high court is already ahead of the curve.

"The Nevada Supreme Court, to its credit, is much better on search and seizure issues than the United States Supreme Court," say JoNell Thomas, a Las Vegas criminal defense attorney who is Nevada's representative on the board of directors of the National American Civil Liberties Union.

In a 9-0 ruling Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court justices said drivers who are merely cited for speeding or similar offenses do not present enough of a threat to law enforcement officers to justify a vehicle search and therefore enjoy Fourth Amendment protection against an unreasonable search.

"The first thing that struck me is that it was a unanimous decision," said Thomas. "That is not often the case with a Fourth Amendment issue.

"The entire court recognized the search (of a car in Iowa) was invalid. There was no question."

Tuesday's decision overturned the drug conviction of Iowa motorist Patrick Knowles, whose car was searched by a police officer who had pulled him over for driving 43 mph in a 25 mph zone. The justices, overturning an Iowa Supreme Court decision, called the search unconstitutional and said the marijuana and related paraphernalia the officer found should not have been admitted at trial.

Iowa apparently is the only state in the union that allowed the search procedures.

"The Nevada Supreme Court wouldn't authorize the type of search Iowa authorized," said Thomas.

She said the decision won't have any impact in Nevada, and probably won't have much of an impact in any states other than Iowa.

"It is far-reaching to the extent that it tells other legislators not to pass more laws that won't pass (constitutional standards)," said Thomas.

Spokesmen for area police departments said their officers always use the standard of probable cause when they search vehicles stopped for a traffic violation.

"You have to have probable cause," said North Las Vegas Police Department spokesman Lt. Mike Blackwell. "If a person is stopped for speeding and it leads to something else, we build on that."

He said the Supreme Court ruling would have no real impact on his department.

Nevada ACLU Executive Director Gary Peck said he hopes the ruling will serve as a warning to police officers who violate Fourth Amendment rights of privacy in other areas besides traffic stops.

"This is related to issues we have raised here in Las Vegas with respect to the way people in the past have been dealt with by police," said Peck.

Though acknowledging the circumstances between searching a vehicle that has been stopped for a traffic violation and ticketing a person who is handing out leaflets or collecting signatures are not the same, he hopes police will take the ruling as a warning.

"This sends a strong message that police officers ought not overstep their bounds," said Peck.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the court, said a police officer's concern for safety and evidence when citing a speeding motorist is not as strong as when a driver is about to be arrested. A motorist simply detained for speeding neither presents a significant threat to the officer's safety nor gives the police cause to suspect that the car contains evidence of a crime, he added.

Officers who fear for their safety during a routine traffic stop may constitutionally order a driver and passengers out of the car, and if reasonably suspicious, frisk them for weapons, the court said. However, an officer has no reason to search for evidence of crime when detaining a motorist simply for a traffic violation, the justices added.

"Once (the driver) was stopped for speeding and issued a citation, all the evidence necessary to prosecute that offense had been obtained," Rehnquist wrote. "No further evidence of excessive speed was going to be found either on the person of the offender or in the passenger compartment of the car."

The justices also reiterated an earlier decision permitting summary searches when police plan to arrest the motorist, saying officers have a constitutionally protected suspicion that people facing the prospect of prison might reach for guns or destroy evidence that could be in their vehicles.