by TChris

A unanimous panel of judges on the Eleventh Circuit struck down a city policy that required protestors to pass through a metal detector. The policy instructed the police to search protestors who made the machine beep. The City of Columbus, Georgia approved the policy in 2002, before an annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation at Fort Benning.

The decision includes a stirring rejection of the claim that individual liberty must give way to security needs after 9/11.

"We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the war on terror is over, because the war on terror is unlikely ever to be truly over," the 11th Circuit said in a ruling issued late Friday. "Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country."

The privacy interests protected by the Fourth Amendment outweigh the City's desire to engage in mass searches for weapons in the absence of a legitimate reason to suspect that each protestor is armed. The court bravely and correctly refused to trade liberty for safety.

It is quite possible that the demonstrations would be safer if the city were permitted "to engage in mass, warrantless, suspicionless searches," Tjoflat said. "Indeed, it is quite possible that our nation would be safer if police were permitted to stop and search anyone they wanted, at any time, for no reason at all." But the Constitution, [Judge Gerald] Tjoflat wrote, allows for "searches based on evidence — rather than potentially effective, broad, prophylactic dragnets — as the constitutional norm."