WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police may set up roadblocks to collect tips about crimes, rejecting concerns that authorities might use the checkpoints to fish for unrelated suspicious activity.
The 6-3 decision allows officers to block traffic and ask motorists for help in solving crimes. Critics have complained that authorities might misuse the power, disguising dragnets as ''informational checkpoints.''
Roadblocks are used for a variety of investigations. For example, in 2002 police used them to try to produce leads in the Elizabeth Smart kidnapping in Utah and the sniper shootings in the Washington, D.C., area.
But the Supreme Court has limited their use.
Although the justices have allowed random sobriety checkpoints to detect drunken drivers and border roadblocks to intercept illegal immigrants, they ruled in 2000 that roadblocks intended for drug searches are an unreasonable invasion of privacy under the Constitution.
In Tuesday's decision, Justice Stephen Breyer said that short stops, ''a very few minutes at most,'' are not too intrusive on motorists, considering the value in crime-solving. Police may hand out fliers or ask drivers to volunteer information, he said.
In a partial dissent, Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg questioned whether random roadblocks yield any useful tips. The delays ''may seem relatively innocuous to some, but annoying to others ... still other drivers may find an unpublicized roadblock at midnight on a Saturday somewhat alarming,'' Stevens wrote for the three.
The constitutionality of the informational roadblocks was challenged by Robert Lidster, accused of drunken driving at a 1997 checkpoint set up to get tips about an unrelated fatal hit-and-run accident. The roadblock was at the same spot and time of night that the hit-and-run took place about a week earlier.
Authorities in Lombard, Ill., got no helpful tips that night in the death of a 70-year-old bicyclist, but they arrested Lidster after police said he nearly hit an officer with his minivan.
Lidster argued that police could have used other methods to get information about the hit-and-run driver, like billboards or stories in newspapers and on radio and television stations. Television coverage of the roadblock did lead to information that helped solve the case.
Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan said the Supreme Court's ruling ''will allow law enforcement in Illinois and across the nation to seek voluntary assistance from citizens in their efforts to solve crime.''
But criminal defense lawyers and civil liberties groups questioned whether the decision would lead to abuse by officers.
''I would hope this wouldn't be an excuse for them to engage in willy-nilly roadblocks,'' said San Antonio, Texas, attorney Gerald Goldstein, former president of National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. ''We're taking the officers at their word that they're looking for information and not looking at the occupants.''
Ronald Allen, a law professor at Northwestern University, said the decision gives police ''another reason to create a roadblock and to pull people over.''
Breyer predicted the ruling would not lead to widespread roadblocks because of limited police funding and community hostility to traffic delays.
Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg agreed with the court's rationale that informational checkpoints are different from roadblocks intended to search for evidence of wrongdoing by the occupants of car. But they wanted a lower court to reconsider whether the stop outside Chicago was reasonable.
Stevens said motorists will be trapped by the checkpoints.
''In contrast to pedestrians, who are free to keep walking when they encounter police officers handing out fliers or seeking information, motorists who confront a roadblock are required to stop, and to remain stopped for as long as the officers choose to detain them,'' he wrote.
Illinois was supported in the case by more than 20 other states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia.
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