July 2, 2009
(Syndicated to Kansas newspapers on June 29, 2009)

When it just doesn’t feel right

We’re all Americans, and Kansans here, right?

You know how sometimes you read about something happening that…just doesn’t feel right. It’s just not how we do things in America and in Kansas.

It’s probably one of the beauties of the Constitution. You really don’t’ have to have studied it at length; you can tell if something is unconstitutional by the way it feels in your stomach. It’s that “this doesn’t feel right” sense that we Americans and Kansans have.

The Kansas Supreme Court apparently has that sense, and at least on one occasion, the Kansas Legislature didn’t.

The case was a guy in Emporia, who on July 6, 2006, was called out of the passenger seat of a car in a parking lot at an Emporia convenience store by an officer who learned that there was an outstanding warrant for the passenger’s arrest.

Nothing fancy here, the guy was wanted by police, he was arrested. But, because some legislators were interested in “getting tough on crime” in the 2006 session, they had enacted a law, which went into effect July 1, 2006, that allowed officers to search a vehicle for just about anything they could think of. The Emporia officer searched the car and subsequently arrested the guy for possession of drug paraphernalia. What was the officer looking for? “I don’t know until I find it,” he testified at the trial.

The law change had been simple, from searching for evidence of “the” crime to evidence of “a” crime of any sort.

Basically if you can think of a reason to arrest someone for anything, you can search the car for…well, whatever it might turn up. Get the suspect back to the stationhouse and find out that he/she isn’t a missing 9-11 terrorist or isn’t the person who robbed the liquor store, and you apologize, release him/her…except if you have found anything in the search of  his/her vehicle that justifies an arrest.

The actual arrest might be just a diversion to get to search a car of someone who looks suspicious to a law enforcement officer for reasons of race, haircut, maybe even wearing a University of Kansas T-shirt in Manhattan.

Stemming from the Emporia case, the Supreme Court last week struck down the “a” crime law, so that searches of a vehicle are related to the reason for which a person is arrested. That sounds pretty fair.  Vehicle searches won’t turn into just hunting expeditions.

Not anything that is going to affect most of us…but it doesn’t upset our stomachs… And that’s a good thing.