The Supreme Court gave its conditional approval today to "informational checkpoints" on the nation's streets, ruling that police may briefly stop traffic in order to inform vehicle occupants of a recent crime and ask if they have any information about it.
The court said such roadblocks present only a minor inconvenience, not a major invasion of privacy, while serving an important public interest. All nine justices agreed that they are permissible under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable detention.
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"The Fourth Amendment does not treat a motorist's car as his castle," Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote for the court. "And special law enforcement concerns will sometimes justify highway stops without individualized suspicion."
The court's ruling should make it easier for police to employ a tactic that has come into play in situations ranging from the search for Elizabeth Smart to airport security operations during Code Orange terrorist alerts.
In the past, the Supreme Court has approved checkpoints for such special purposes as checking for drunk drivers or hunting contraband near U.S. borders.
But in 2000, the court invalidated police checkpoints in Indianapolis at which officers stopped cars at random and searched them for drugs using sniffer dogs. In that case, the court held that "the ordinary enterprise of investigating crimes" was not sufficient justification.
But yesterday's decision narrowed the scope of the 2000 ruling. The checkpoint approved yesterday was different than the one in the earlier case, Breyer wrote, because "police expected the information elicited to help them apprehend, not the vehicle's occupants, but other individuals."
The case arose from the 1997 drunk-driving conviction of Robert S. Lidster, who was stopped by police at an informational checkpoint in Lombard, Ill. The police were passing out flyers and asking for help in finding the perpetrator of a fatal hit-and-run at the same site a week earlier; Lidster nearly hit an officer with his car and smelled of alcohol, police charged.
Lidster appealed his case to the Illinois Supreme Court, which struck down the checkpoints by a vote of 4 to 3. Citing the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 ruling in the Indianapolis case, the Illinois court said it did not want to "make roadblocks 'a routine part of American life.'"
