'The Most Humiliating Experience I Have Ever Had' -- Why Is the Supreme Court So Callous About Privacy?

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted May 9, 2009.

"When these justifications are absent, a search of an arrestee's vehicle will be unreasonable, unless police obtain a warrant or show that an other exception to the warrant requirement applies," the court ruled.

Scott Lemieux, writing on the American Prospect blog Tapped, called it a "rare Roberts Court victory for the Fourth Amendment."

"Today's case will at least prevent the police from using unrelated minor offenses to justify drug searches without probable cause," he wrote.

Indeed, for decades this practice has been a common component of the war on drugs, a systematic violation of the Fourth Amendment.

One Cato Institute policy paper ("A Society of Suspects") argued way back in 1992 that the advent of the drug war meant that the Fourth Amendment has come to be understood as prohibiting "only 'unreasonable' searches and seizures -- and what is reasonable in the milieu of a war on drugs is construed very broadly in favor of local police and federal drug agents."

(Indeed, in Gant's case, at a hearing on whether the cocaine evidence should be admissable at trial, one of the arresting officers told the court that he had searched Gant's vehicle "because the law says we can do it.")

The ruling in Gant was meant to correct the experience of "countless individuals guilty of nothing more serious than a traffic violation" whose cars have been searched unconstitutionally.

Gant might have shown that the justices have some appreciation left for the Fourth Amendment -- and in the age of warrantless wiretapping and telecom immunity, this is no small thing.

But meanwhile, aside from providing troubling evidence that the escalating war against prescription drugs is criminalizing students, the oral arguments in Redding are proof of another problem characteristic of so many other cases in recent years in which the Court has sided with the powerful against the powerless.

The current Supreme Court bench is stacked with people who cannot bring themselves to comprehend -- let alone empathize with -- egregious abuses of power that affect people with whom they simply can't identify. (Chief Justice John Roberts, after all, is the man who ruled that police were well within their rights to handcuff a 12-year-old girl for eating a french fry on a subway platform.)

Thus, an adult male is vindicated upon proving that police had no business snooping in his car (even though they found cocaine), and a now-19-year-old girl is subjected to the snickering of old men in robes who wonder aloud why having to strip in front of school administrators -- looking for drugs with the strength of Advil -- might constitute a violation of her rights.

Some commenters see the Redding arguments as a shining example of why the Supreme Court is in desperate need of another female justice.

Politics Daily columnist Patricia Murphy wrote this week: "Justice Ginsburg knew why Savana Redding would have been damaged by the moment, just as she alone on the Court knows what it is like to be pregnant, or to carry a child, or face gender discrimination in education or employment." (Note to the right: there's the scary "judicial empathy" your pundits are so alarmed about.)

If the Supreme Court issued purely data-driven decisions about chemical compounds or mathematics equations or string theory, Ginsberg's perspective as the only woman on the Court would be as irrelevant as her perspective as the shortest member of the Court.

But because the Court issues subjective decisions, and because those decisions frequently affect women differently than men, a female point of view can make every difference in the world.

See more stories tagged with: supreme court, fourth amendment, savana redding, arizona v. gant, safford unified school di

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of AlterNet's Rights & Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »