December 8, 1998
High Court Strikes Down Iowa's
Traffic Stop-and-Search Law
DES MOINES -- In a solid victory for the freedom and privacy of allIowans, the United States Supreme Court today put an end to the policepractice of arbitrarily searching people stopped for minor trafficviolations. The Iowa Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups that filed a"friend-of-the-court" brief in the case, hailed the unanimous ruling inKnowles v. Iowa authored by Chief Justice Rehnquist. "Iowa's brief experiment with a police state is now, thankfully, over,"said Ben Stone, Executive Director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union, avocal foe of the tactic. "Iowans can once again enjoy the freedom ofknowing they can drive down the street and not fear being searched by apolice officer if they make an illegal turn or forget to use their turnsignal." Today's decision overturns a 5-4 ruling by the Iowa Supreme Court in1997, upholding the police practice known as "search incident tocitation." Normally, police must either physically arrest someone orhave "probable cause" before they can conduct a search. The Iowa court in the Knowles case had said the code of Iowa authorized police to search people cited with for traffic violations even if theywere not taken into custody, and that such searches were not inviolation of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The State of Iowa had argued that concerns for officer safety and thepreservation of evidence justified the search tactic. The Court foundboth rationales lacking. "Even without the search authority Iowa urges,officers have other, independent bases to search for weapons and protectthemselves from danger," wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist. "Nor hasIowa shown . . . the need to discover and preserve evidence. OnceKnowles was stopped for speeding and issued a citation, all the evidencenecessary to prosecute that offense had been obtained." Stone noted that the Court could have waited until June to rule on thecase, but instead issued its decision less than five weeks after oralarguments. "The Justices' extremely swift reversal reveals both how easyit was for the Court to find this outrageous affront to libertyunconstitutional, and how important it was to protect Iowans from anyfurther violations of their privacy by the police," he said. The ICLU, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and the NationalAssociation of Criminal Defense Lawyers vigorously opposed the policepractice in a friend-of-the-court brief authored by Professor JimTomkovicz of the University of Iowa Law School. Attorneys Paul Rosenberg and Maria Ruhtenberg of Des Moines argued thecase on behalf of Patrick Knowles, a Newton man stopped for speeding in1996 and subsequently searched simply because he was receiving a trafficticket. He was arrested and sentenced to 90 days in jail after policefound marijuana under his seat.
