Take Five: What Was The Supreme Court Thinking Of?

By Mary McHugh

 

I was already mad at the Supreme Court for giving the election to Bush, but their decision last month to uphold a lower court’s conviction of a woman who was arrested and hauled off to jail because she and her children weren’t wearing seat belts made me furious. I haven’t read any angry op-ed pieces about this decision, so I decided to protest in this column. I would love to know what you think.

In case you didn’t read about it, in 1997 a woman named Gail Atwater from Lago Vista, Texas, a suburban mom with two children 4 and 6 years old was driving her pickup truck slowly (15 miles an hour) along the route from soccer practice to her home to look for her son Mackinley’s favorite toy that had fallen out of her pickup truck. She let the children take off their seat belts so they could look out the window to try and spot the rubber vampire bat. She was going so slowly on a deserted road that she thought it would be safe for the children to take off their seat belts temporarily.

According to the account in The New York Times, a police officer pulled her over, stuck his finger in her chest and started yelling about what a terrible mother she was for not making her children wear their seat belts. “I begged him to keep his voice down because the children were starting to cry,” she said, but the officer kept it up, scaring the children even more. Her license and insurance card had been in her purse that was stolen the day before, so she was fingerprinted and put in jail for several hours. The officer was going to arrest the children too but a neighbor happened by and took them home with her.

Mrs. Atwater sued the city of Lago Vista for false arrest and after a four-year battle in the courts, the Supreme Court ruled against her in a 5-4 decision, making it legal for a police officer to arrest any of us, even for a minor infraction, without violating the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable seizure. Am I crazy or wasn’t that seizure more than a little unreasonable?

As Mrs. Atwater was quoted in The Times, “The maximum fine for what I did is $50, and there is no jail penalty. A federal judge couldn’t have jailed me for that violation, and yet a small-town policeman could.” Mrs. Atwater is like most young mothers out there -- I mean she’s a lot like my own soccer-mom daughter with three young children. She was on the soccer board and the board of the PTA, for heaven’s sake. She was active in local politics and went to City Council meetings. She is a respiratory therapist and her husband is an emergency room physician. They sold their home to pay the $100,000 in legal bills incurred while fighting this case.

But back to the Supreme Court. They voted uncharacteristically. David Souter voted with the conservative justices, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas and Kennedy, saying that although Mrs. Atwater had been subjected to “gratuitous humiliations” and “pointless indignity” the officer did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Souter thought siding with her would result in more constitutional litigation over ordinary arrests. Well, maybe this kind of thing should be litigated.

Sandra Day O’Connor seemed to think so in her dissenting opinion, when she disagreed with the four conservative justices with whom she usually sides. She warned that “such unbounded discretion” for the police “carries with it grave potential for abuse,” and added that “as the recent debate over racial profiling demonstrates all too clearly, a relatively minor traffic infraction may serve as an excuse for stopping and harassing an individual.” Or, as Mrs Atwater said in The Times article, “If someone like me, a soccer mom, can be humiliated and handcuffed in front of her children, what happens to the poor migrant worker or minority when they’re stopped?”

Amen. I guess what really worries me is that something will happen to one of the Justices during Bush’s term and another conservative will be appointed to the bench who will open the way to more decisions like this. Whatever happened to compassionate conservatism?

Anyway, I rely on all of you sensible, logical readers to tell me if I’ve overlooked something here. Do send me your opinion and I’m sure it will make more sense than the Supreme Court’s opinion.

 

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