No probable cause

Chief Justice John Roberts expressed frustration Tuesday after failing to persuade a majority of his brethren to review a lower court ruling he said will "grant drunk drivers 'one free swerve' " that could potentially end someone's life.

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Virginia officials who had their drunken driving conviction of Joseph A. Moses Harris Jr. thrown out by that state's Supreme Court. Police were notified by an anonymous tipster that Mr. Harris was driving while intoxicated, but the arresting officer did not see the driver break any traffic laws.

Justice Roberts noted that close to 13,000 people die in alcohol-related car crashes a year, which equals to one death every 40 minutes. He said a majority of the courts have ruled it doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure to pull over drunken drivers based on anonymous tips from programs like the "Drunk Busters Hotline."

But other courts, including some in Wyoming, Massachusetts and Connecticut, have agreed with Virginia in saying police must see a traffic violation before pulling over a drunken driving suspect based on an anonymous tip.

Drunken driving is a serious matter, and police should rigorously enforce the law when they see probable cause in a driver's behavior. But the Virginia court was correct: The presumption of privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment, the requirement that police themselves see some reason to make a traffic stop rather than depend on a tip from a source with unknown motivations (and unsupported by any sworn affidavit), are more important than some theoretical advantage in further sanitizing our roads.

Once that precedent is set, wouldn't police also be justified in breaking down our front doors with battering rams based merely on some anonymous tip that "there's drug-dealing going on there"?

The answer, of course, is that they already do. That's precisely how 92-year-old Kathryn Johnston of Atlanta came to be gunned down in her home on Nov. 21, 2006, by (then) Atlanta police officers in what some have called "the world's worst no-knock warrant case."

Needless to say, no drugs were found.

Do decades of watching such terrors become "routine" -- does the support of "a majority of the courts" -- so inure us to such behaviors that we should now applaud them?

What the courts should be doing is reining in this madness, not enabling and encouraging it. Are there no longer any limits to government power, so long as the authorities can claim the good intention of "saving one more life"?