RULING ALLOWS POLICE TO ORDER PASSENGERS OUT OF VEHICLES.

Byline: Aaron Epstein Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

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'' now 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 officers 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.

Stevens accused the majority of taking ``the unprecedented step'' of permitting ``routine and arbitrary seizures of obviously innocent citizens'' in violation of the Fourth Amendment's bar on unreasonable seizures.

Writing separately, Kennedy said the ruling, when coupled with a decision last year that allowed the police to make traffic stops as a pretext to look for drugs, ``puts tens of millions of passengers at the risk of arbitrary control by the police.''

The case decided Wednesday originated on a June evening in 1994 when Maryland State Trooper David Hughes said he pursued and finally stopped a speeding car on Interstate 95 north of Baltimore.

He said he noticed two passengers looking back and ducking out of sight several times during the pursuit. He said the driver and the front-seat passenger, Jerry Lee Wilson, were extremely nervous after he stopped the car.

When he ordered Wilson outside, a substance that appeared to be crack cocaine dropped to the ground. Both Wilson and the driver were charged with drug offenses.

But a Maryland appeals court suppressed the evidence, ruling that Hughes had no valid reason to order Wilson out of the car. That decision was overturned Wednesday.