The Week: Why Antonin Scalia was right to defend a drug dealer

The Week: Why Antonin Scalia was right to defend a drug dealer by Michael Brendan Dougherty:

The conservative justice’s exquisite defense of the Fourth Amendment is a credit to the American justice system.

Prado Navarette in August 2008 was driving 30 pounds of marijuana through California when he was stopped by the cops on suspicion of drunk driving. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court. And today, in a blistering dissent joined by three of the court’s liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan — Justice Antonin Scalia defended Navarette, arguing that the search of his car was a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.

But Scalia was unable to convince his conservative confreres, who joined a majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that deemed the search legal. The issue before the court was this: Whether the Fourth Amendment requires an officer who receives an anonymous tip regarding a drunken or reckless driver to corroborate dangerous driving before stopping the vehicle.