Pubdate: Sat, 05 June 1999
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 1999 The Washington Post Company
Address: 1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
Feedback: http://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/edit/letters/letterform.htm
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Nat Hentoff

A CONSPIRATOR FOR THE CONSTITUTION

After Hillary Rodham Clinton revealed the existence of a massive right-wing
conspiracy against her husband, some members of the press fingered John
Whitehead -- an attorney and president of the Rutherford Institute -- as one
of the leading conspirators. After all, the Rutherford Institute had helped
fund the Paula Jones lawsuit against the president.

Here are some recent indications of what Whitehead is actually up to. He
writes a syndicated newspaper column, Freedom Under Fire, which appears in
more than 100 newspapers around the country.

Focusing on random drug testing -- without reasonable suspicion -- of public
school students, Whitehead accuses the Supreme Court of failing to give
students a clear lesson about the Fourth Amendment:

"The same students that are being educated about the Constitution and the
Bill of Rights in their government classes are being stripped of their own
constitutional rights when the bell rings and the class is over."

Whitehead insists the time has come for the Supreme Court to inform the
schools that the "Fourth Amendment's constitutional protection from unlawful
search and seizure applies to everyone, regardless of age or education."
Especially now with the "oppressive safety measures" after the Littleton,
Colo. shootings.

Is there any member of Congress these days who will so boldly challenge the
rampant "zero tolerance" approach of school authorities? Even among the very
few civil libertarians at the Capitol?

In another column, Whitehead is appalled at the April Supreme Court decision
that a police search of a car can include the personal belongings of
passengers who themselves are under no suspicion of unlawful activity.

Whatever happened, asks Whitehead, to "innocent until proved guilty"? From
now on, "associating with friends in a car or sharing a ride to work carries
a criminal risk. . . . By allowing the police such unfettered discretion . .
. the Supreme Court decision will force people to forfeit their rights at
the automobile door" -- as students forfeit their rights at the schoolhouse
door.

In his column on law enforcement agents' profiling of airplane passengers,
Whitehead quotes from Georgetown University Law School Prof. David Cole's
carefully documented book, "No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American
Criminal Justice System." Cole charts the degradation of our abstractly
cherished Bill of Rights.

Whitehead cites Cole's report that "the list of characteristics used by law
enforcement officers to identify drug traffickers includes:

"Being one of the first to deplane, the last to deplane or deplaning in the
middle; buying a first-class ticket or buying a coach ticket; using a
one-way ticket or using a round-trip ticket; traveling with a companion or
alone; and wearing expensive clothing or dressing casually."

Whitehead goes on to tell what happened to Lawrence Boze. At Los Angeles
International Airport, he was taken from a ticket counter and detained in a
security area. He and his bags were searched, and he was interrogated as to
his identity and where and why he was traveling.

Boze kept demanding an explanation for this abrupt interference with his
travel plans. The only answer he got was that he matched "the profile."
Boze, former president of the National Bar Association, is black. When
nothing of police interest was found, he was sent on his way.

Whitehead also writes of a Chicago travel agent, Patricia Appleton, "who has
been repeatedly stopped and searched -- even strip-searched -- by U.S.
Customs Service inspectors." During one trip, the well-dressed black
passenger was traveling alone. Writes Whitehead: "Stripped, forced to bend
over and grab her ankles, she equated the humiliation and vulnerability she
felt to when she was brutally raped when she was 15." Appleton is one of "84
African-American women who have filed a class action suit against the U.S.
Customs Service."

I am sure John Whitehead would be glad to put the White House on the mailing
list for his Freedom Under Fire columns. In the spirit of Supreme Court
Justice Hugo Black, he also sends a free pocket-size copy of the
Constitution to anyone who writes to him at the Rutherford Institute in
Charlottesville, Va.

The president, who has eviscerated the right to habeas corpus, could benefit
from Whitehead's offer.

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