Court Rejects California Appeal on Drug Evidence

WASHINGTON —  The Supreme Court said Tuesday that California narcotics agents may not use drug evidence in court that had been legally seized at Ontario International Airport because they failed to get a search warrant before running lab tests on the material.

For prosecutors and law enforcement officials, the case provided a classic illustration of what is wrong with the so-called “exclusionary rule,” which bars the use in court of improperly obtained evidence.

The theory behind the exclusionary rule is that the only effective way to prevent police from acting illegally is to penalize them when they do. But California Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp contended that narcotics agents at the Ontario airport should be permitted to thoroughly search and test the contents of a package that has been lawfully seized.

In the case decided Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected without comment Van de Kamp’s appeal of a ruling by a state appellate court in San Bernardino. The state court had held that agents may examine packages that are handed to them by airport workers but that they may not do extensive tests on what they are given.

President Bush hopes that his crime bill, which he announced this month, will make it easier for such evidence to be used in court. The bill would modify the exclusionary rule by saying that no evidence would be excluded from court if the officers acted in “a reasonably objective belief” that they were complying with the law.

The San Bernardino case involved Stephen E. Leichty, a former college student from Claremont, who delivered a package to the air freight terminal at the Ontario airport in September, 1986. The package aroused the suspicions of the cargo supervisor because it smelled of ether.

Opening the package, the supervisor found several Pepsi bottles filled with an odd liquid. He notified narcotics agents, who examined the liquid and ran several spot tests on it. They suspected that the liquid was methamphetamine, an illegal stimulant.

Tested at Police Lab

To confirm their suspicions, the agents took the package to the crime lab at Los Angeles Police Department headquarters. Armed with evidence from the tests, agents obtained a search warrant and raided Leichty’s apartment in Claremont, where they found equipment for making the illegal drug.

Leichty pleaded no contest to the drug charges against him and was sentenced to 120 days in jail. But the state appellate court last year threw out all the evidence against Leichty and dismissed the conviction.

The judges had no objection to the actions of the cargo supervisor, who as a private citizen is not covered by the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures. But they reasoned that the narcotics officers, as government agents, violated the Fourth Amendment because they failed to get a search warrant before running lab tests on the liquid.

Therefore, they held, all the evidence in this case (People of California vs. Leichty, 88-1666) “is subject to the exclusionary rule.” First the state Supreme Court and now the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Van de Kamp’s appeal.

Meanwhile, in a second case from Southern California, the justices told the federal appellate court in Pasadena to take another look at a $152,000 verdict against Los Angeles County growing out of a jail-cell suicide (Cabrales vs. County of Los Angeles, 88-1581).

In 1987, a jury concluded that the county failed to provide adequate psychiatric care to inmate Sergio Cabrales and therefore was responsible for his death. Cabrales, who was awaiting trial on a burglary charge, tried to kill himself once in December, 1983. On four occasions, he was interviewed by jail psychiatrists, who concluded that he was not suicidal.

Hanged Himself

But after a fight in which he stabbed another inmate, Cabrales was put in an isolation unit, where he hanged himself on Jan. 3, 1984.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict against Los Angeles County in favor of the inmate’s mother, Josephina. The “medical understaffing” at the Men’s Central Jail amounted to a county policy of “deliberate indifference” to the health and welfare of inmates, the appeals court reasoned.

Acting on an appeal by county lawyers Tuesday, the Supreme Court on a 7-2 vote told the appellate judges to restudy their conclusion based on a February ruling in which the justices tried to clarify the meaning of “deliberate indifference” by city officials.

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