Pubdate: Thu, 22 Mar 2001
Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA)
Copyright: 2001 San Jose Mercury News
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Author: Linda Greenhouse, New York Times
Note: The Washington Post contributed to this article.

JUSTICES REJECT SOME PUBLIC-HOSPITAL DRUG SCREENINGS

Tests Of Pregnant Women Were Given To Police

U.S. Supreme Court

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that hospital workers 
cannot test pregnant women for illegal drug use without their consent if 
the purpose is to alert the police to a crime.

The 6-3 decision did not finally resolve a 10-year-old lawsuit brought 
against the city of Charleston, S.C., by women who were arrested, under a 
cooperative program between a public hospital and the police department, 
after a positive urine test for cocaine. The question of whether any of the 
10 plaintiffs actually consented to the tests remains to be decided in the 
lower courts.

But the majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens was a strong 
statement that the facts of the women's pregnancy and of possible danger to 
their fetuses through illegal drug use did not change the basic 
constitutional analysis: In the absence of either a warrant or consent, the 
drug tests amounted to unconstitutional searches.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote a separate concurring opinion. Justice 
Antonin Scalia wrote a dissenting opinion that was joined in part by Chief 
Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas.

The court overturned a 1999 decision by the federal appeals court in 
Richmond that regardless of whether the women provided informed consent, 
the warrantless drug-testing program was justified by the ``special needs'' 
of stopping drug use by pregnant women and getting the women into treatment.

Stevens said the ``special needs'' exception to the Fourth Amendment, which 
the court has recognized in limited circumstances to justify drug testing 
for health and safety purposes, did not apply to a program that was so 
directly connected to law enforcement.

``The central and indispensable feature of the policy from its inception 
was the use of law enforcement to coerce the patients into substance-abuse 
treatment,'' Stevens said. ``While the ultimate goal of the program may 
well have been to get the women in question into substance-abuse treatment 
and off of drugs,'' he continued, ``the immediate objective of the searches 
was to generate evidence for law enforcement purposes in order to reach 
that goal.''

And that was the constitutional problem, Stevens said: Because law 
enforcement ``always serves some broader social purpose or objective,'' a 
statement of a worthy ultimate goal could not suffice to insulate a 
particular law enforcement program from constitutional scrutiny.

The ``stark and unique fact'' of this case, he said, was that the 
cooperative program between the hospital and the police ``was designed to 
obtain evidence of criminal conduct by the tested patients that would be 
turned over to the police and that could be admissible in subsequent 
criminal prosecutions.''

The hospital of the Medical University of South Carolina and the Charleston 
police devised the drug-testing program in the face of growing concern 
about the fate of ``crack babies'' born to cocaine-using mothers.

At the time, the late 1980s and early 1990s, jurisdictions around the 
country were considering various novel legal theories for prosecuting 
pregnant women for behavior that endangered their fetuses, to the concern 
of many medical professionals who warned that the most direct effect would 
be to frighten drug-using women away from prenatal care.

Before Charleston first modified and then dropped its program after several 
years, 30 women were arrested, with nearly all the charges dropped after 
the women agreed to enter treatment. Some who tested positive for cocaine 
during labor were taken to jail in handcuffs or leg shackles shortly after 
giving birth.

The hospital did not test all its maternity patients, only those who met 
certain criteria, many of which correlated with poverty.

In his dissenting opinion, Scalia said the program served a legitimate 
medical purpose, and the fact that it served a law enforcement purpose as 
well should not take it outside the scope of the court's ``special needs'' 
doctrine. He also argued that testing a ``lawfully obtained'' urine sample 
did not constitute a search as the Constitution defines the term. Thomas 
and Rehnquist did not join him in that argument.

The court has applied that doctrine a handful of times, to justify the drug 
testing of student athletes, Customs agents and railroad workers involved 
in train accidents, all in the absence of the warrants that would 
ordinarily be required.

Stevens said those precedents differed from the case Wednesday in several 
important respects. The health and safety justifications were ``divorced 
from the state's general interest in law enforcement,'' he said, while 
``the invasion of privacy in this case is far more substantial than in 
those cases.''

Lynn Paltrow, a lawyer who represented the plaintiffs in the lower courts, 
said Wednesday that the decision was ``a victory for all patients who are 
entitled to expect that when they go to the doctor they will receive 
medical care and not a search for police purposes.'' Paltrow is executive 
director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, a program of the Women's 
Law Project in Philadelphia.

The hospital has argued throughout the litigation that the women signed 
forms that provided consent to the urine tests and validated the sharing of 
the information with the police. The plaintiffs' attorneys said Wednesday 
that the women were not told in advance about the drug testing and provided 
no valid consent. That issue will now be fought out in the 4th U.S. Circuit 
Court of Appeals.

The Washington Post contributed to this article.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens