
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 12, 1990                   TAG: 9003122978
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

COURT RULING

THE U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 last month that the constitutional ban on warrantless searches and illegal seizures does not protect foreign citizens abroad. The common-sense response is: Why should it? It's the U.S. Constitution, after all, and not the constitution of Andorra or wherever.

Nor does the court's thinking seem out of line even when the searches and seizures involve U.S. drug agents. Not out of line, anyway, so long as the agents are operating (to quote Chief Justice William Rehnquist) "through diplomatic understanding, treaty or legislation" with the host country.

Even the three dissenting justices indirectly acknowledged it is a political rather than judicial issue. They argued that the ruling may cause disrespect for U.S. law; in other words, that it is unwise policy.

But the ruling applies not only to the searches and seizures themselves, but also to trials in the United States on the basis of evidence so obtained abroad.

This is thinner ice, and raises the prospect of a dual standard of justice in American courts. Still, you could maintain that the U.S. courts in such cases are acting under authority delegated them by the other country via diplomatic arrangement, etc. - in a rough way, a mirror image of Western European countries' refusal to extradite accused murderers to the United States without a promise that the death penalty won't be imposed.

Apparently, however, the ruling also applies to the trial in this country of Manuel Noriega. And obviously, the former Panamanian dictator had no such arrangement. His capture, and the seizure of evidence to bolster the drug-running case against him, was an act of war.

We continue to believe that, on balance, the U.S. invasion of Panama did more good than harm. But let's not deceive ourselves that it was something other than a war.

A few hundred people (mostly Panamanians) were killed, which by modern standards made it a small war. It lasted for only a few days, which made it a short one.

Still, it was a war. It shouldn't be seen as an operation simply to arrest a drug offender, so he could be brought to routine trial in a routine U.S. court under looser rules of evidence now made routine by the Supreme Court. Seeing it that way makes the war harder, not easier, to justify.

by CNB