Gail Atwater, of Lago Vista, Tex., says she'd run into local policeman Bart Turek before.

The officer had previously stopped her for suspicion of driving without having her 4-year-old son belted into her pickup truck. In that first case, however, Atwater says Turek did not cite her, since it turned out her son was, indeed, wearing his seat belt.

She wasn't as lucky the second time. A toy had fallen out of their truck, and Atwater says she'd instructed both her son and daughter -- age 6 -- to undo their belts so they could crane their heads out the window, searching for the missing item as their mother drove the truck at 15 mph down an otherwise abandoned dirt road.

Sure enough, the ever vigilant Officer Turek chose that moment to show up again. When she was unable to produce her driver's license and registration for the officer -- telling him her purse had been stolen -- he became enraged, Atwater contends.

"You're going to jail!" she says the officer told her.

What 's undisputed is that Gail Atwater, 45, was indeed arrested, handcuffed, and locked in a jail cell for about an hour on that day back in 1997, until she could post $310 bail. And all this happened even though Texas law does not stipulate any jail time, even for those convicted of the offense of "not wearing a seat belt."

Atwater later pleaded "no contest" to three seat belt violations, paying $50 for each. She was also charged $110 in towing fees.

She asked the city to refund the $110, but received no satisfaction. So she and her husband -- an emergency room physician -- went to court.

Monday -- their house long since sold and having borrowed money from their parents for $110,000 in legal fees to date -- the Atwaters and their case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which heard arguments on whether Atwater's arrest and jailing violated the Fourth Amendment, which bans unreasonable searches and seizures.

Lawyers for the city argued "The state of Texas has a very significant interest in making sure that toddlers are wearing their seat belts so they won't be harmed or killed in accidents."

But Atwater's attorney, Robert DeCarli, responded "Every driver, if they get caught committing a traffic violation, they expect to get a ticket. Nobody expects to be handcuffed and taken to jail."

"You've got the perfect case," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Atwater's attorney in court Monday. Then, turning to the city's attorney, she chided, "Even knowing it was a mother with two small children in a small town. ... This is kind of an amazing case. But you think that's fine."

Unfortunately, other justices seemed more tolerant of such oppression. "It is not a constitutional violation for a police officer to be a jerk," snarled Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Nonetheless, as Justice O'Connor seems to have sensed, in this case the state (having backed Officer Turek's call) is dead wrong.

Sure, most citizens would grant government some authority to restrict obviously dangerous behaviors on the roads. But this notion that officials can and should be empowered to stop and arrest and jail anyone, anywhere, because the authorities have some "compelling interest" in child welfare is very dangerous. In theory, don't we all collectively incur some of the "costs" if children aren't given properly balance diets? Should child welfare workers therefore be allowed to break in our doors at mealtime and conduct "spot vegetable inspections" ... without a warrant?

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety," Ben Franklin warned us in 1759.

If this is to remain a free country, responsible adults must retain a certain leeway to exercise their own discretion as to when it is or is not sensible to have their kids "buckled up." And even if it was appropriate to fine Ms. Atwater that $150, arresting and jailing her -- thus necessitating the towing of her truck -- for such a minor offense was, by definition, "unreasonable."

The high court has done some absurd hair-splitting of late, as in their decision in the case of the Indiana drug checkpoints last week, ruling police can't randomly stop drivers to look for drugs ... though it's still OK to stop us to see if we're drunk, or just to "check our papers" ... whereupon any drug offense they detect becomes fair game.

Instead of dreaming up such finer and finer distinctions -- if we are indeed to restore our promised government of "powers sharply limited" -- the court's job now is clearly to re-establish a "default setting" which restricts the government from interfering in any but the most egregious threats to the public safety.

And Gail Atwater's actions did not constitute such a danger.

Here's hoping the Supreme Court vindicates Ms. Atwater, and sends our police back to running down kidnappers, murderers, and thieves.

"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

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