THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 20, 1997 TAG: 9702200121
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: 43 lines
For safety reasons, police officers may order passengers as well as drivers to get out of vehicles during traffic stops, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 Wednesday.
The court, continuing its tough-on-crime trend, concluded that the public interest in protecting the lives of police officers outweighed the ``minimal'' intrusion on the privacy of passengers.
But the dissenters, Justices John Paul Stevens and Anthony Kennedy, warned that tens of millions of ``wholly innocent passengers'' may be ordered out ``simply because they have the misfortune to be seated in a car whose driver has committed a minor traffic offense.''
Twenty years ago, in a Pennsylvania case, the court gave the police authority to order drivers out of cars that are lawfully stopped on highways. On Wednesday, the court used the identical rationale to extend that authority to passengers.
``The same weighty interest in officer safety is present regardless of whether the occupant of the stopped car is a driver or passenger,'' Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist declared in a Maryland case.
He conceded that there was more reason to detain drivers than passengers, because drivers are at least suspected of having committed a traffic offense when their cars are stopped.
But the motivation of some passengers to conceal evidence of a serious crime and resort to violence ``is every bit as great as that of the driver,'' Rehnquist said.
By ordering passengers out of their cars, they would be ``denied access to any possible weapon that might be concealed in the interior of the passenger compartment,'' he said.
Still, there is disagreement within police ranks over whether ordering people out of a car is the safest thing to do.
``Many police instructors teach that it is safer for a lone officer to require all persons to remain in the vehicle, so that he is not outflanked,'' several police organizations told the court in a legal brief.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SUPREME COURT RULING