Supreme Court: Hospitals can't drug-test moms without consent
 |
|
||||||||||
WASHINGTON - Public hospitals cannot test pregnant women for drugs and turn the results over to police without the women's consent, the Supreme Court said yesterday in a ruling on the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches.
Some women who tested positive for drugs at a South Carolina public hospital were arrested in their beds shortly after giving birth.
The justices ruled 6-3 that such testing without patients' consent violates the Constitution even though the goal was to prevent harm to their fetuses from crack cocaine.
"It's a very, very important decision in protecting the right to privacy of all Americans," said Priscilla Smith, lawyer for the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, who represented the South Carolina women. "It reaffirms that pregnant women have that same right to a confidential relationship with their doctors."
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that while the ultimate goal of the hospital's testing program may have been to get women into drug treatment, "the immediate objective of the searches was to generate evidence for law-enforcement purposes in order to reach that goal."
When hospitals gather evidence "for the specific purpose of incriminating those patients, they have a special obligation to make sure that the patients are fully informed about their constitutional rights," he said.
Stevens' opinion was joined by Justices Sandra Day O'Connor, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer. Justice Anthony Kennedy filed a separate opinion also concluding such tests are unlawful.
Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Writing for the three, Scalia said doctors are supposed to have patients' welfare in mind, and "that they have in mind in addition the provision of evidence to the police should make no difference."
The Constitution's Fourth Amendment generally requires that searches be authorized by a court warrant or based on reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.
The Supreme Court has allowed drug testing without a warrant or individual suspicion when the government can demonstrate a "special need" - for example, preventing drug use by public high-school students or by railroad workers. However, the results in such cases would not be turned over to police.
"The invasion of privacy in this case is far more substantial than in those cases," Stevens wrote, noting that patients normally expect medical test results to be kept private.
The decision reversed a federal appeals-court ruling that said the South Carolina hospital's drug-testing policy was a valid effort to reduce crack-cocaine use by pregnant women.
Employers can forceworkers into arbitration
WASHINGTON -- Employers can force workers to take job-related disputes to arbitration rather than to court, the Supreme Court said yesterday in a ruling with special significance for employees who are not union members.
The court divided 5-4 to rule that employers can use a federal law to enforce the arbitration agreements many workers sign when they take jobs.
The court's conservative-led majority took a narrow view of a federal law from the early days of the labor era that makes commercial arbitration agreements enforceable in federal court. The majority said an exception to the law did not apply to the case of a gay electronics salesman at a Circuit City store who claimed he was harassed at work.
While employees can still try to challenge the arbitration agreements, the ruling strengthens employers' hands while giving employees fewer options to claim they were treated unfairly.
The decision will probably increase the popularity of binding arbitration among employers, said employment lawyer Laura Allen of the New York firm Brown & Wood. "It means employers can continue doing what they've been doing already, only more so," she said.
Business groups already champion the practice as a cheaper, simpler and fairer alternative to resolving cases in court.
Circuit City Stores had asked a federal judge to rule that the 1925 Federal Arbitration Act required Saint Clair Adams to settle his discrimination claim by arbitration.
The heart of yesterday's ruling is a portion of the 1925 law that makes an exception for "seamen, railroad employees or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce."
Adams' lawyers said the "commerce" part of the phrase applied to him, and a federal appeals court agreed. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the arbitration-enforcement law did not apply to employment or labor contracts at all.
Circuit City contended that the exception from the arbitration enforcement law was limited to workers actually involved in moving goods from one state to another, and the Supreme Court agreed.
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the court majority, said the 9th Circuit interpretation is unworkable and would spawn more lawsuits. He was joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Sandra Day O'Connor.
Arbitration clauses in employment contracts typically apply to nonunion workers who sign them as a condition of employment. Critics of the practice say workers often don't read the legal fine print and don't realize what rights they are signing away.
Use of arbitration in employment cases has risen in recent decades, and about 10 percent of U.S. workers are now covered by binding arbitration.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissenting opinion that accused the majority of "playing ostrich" to the legislative and historical context of the arbitration law and its consequences.
That history includes opposition to the arbitration law from organized labor, which feared it would force courts to enforce unfair labor contracts, Stevens wrote for himself and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen J. Breyer. Justice David H. Souter filed a separate dissent.
Divorced woman cankeep insurance money
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that a divorced woman may keep $46,000 from her former husband's employer-provided life-insurance policy because he failed to remove her as the beneficiary before he died.
The high court, by a 7-2 vote, overturned a Washington Supreme Court ruling that the man's two children from a previous marriage were entitled to the money.
The court's majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, said federal law regulating employee benefit plans pre-empted a state law providing that the designation of a spouse as a beneficiary is automatically revoked upon divorce.
The case involved Donna Rae Egelhoff, whose ex-husband, David, worked at Boeing and died in a car accident more than two months after their divorce in 1994. He died without a will, and his ex-wife still was designated as the beneficiary of his pension and life-insurance policy. The insurance proceeds were paid to his ex-wife.
His children from a previous marriage, Samantha and David, then sued to recover the insurance proceeds.