Justices Hear Case on Drug-Detection Dogs
 

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High Court Is Asked to Decide on Legality of Such Searches During Traffic Stops

By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 11, 2004; Page A09

Nothing seemed unusual on the afternoon six years ago when Illinois state trooper Daniel Gillette pulled Roy Caballes over for driving six miles per hour faster than the posted speed limit of 65.

Gillette indicated he would let Caballes off with a warning. But as Gillette went through some paperwork, a second trooper arrived with a drug-detection dog and began to stroll around Caballes's car.

The dog reacted to the scent of drugs in the trunk, and the troopers opened it to find a shipment of marijuana. Caballes was convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case. To be decided is whether using a drug-detection dog on a car pulled over for a traffic offense is an invasion of privacy for which police need a specific justification, or merely an aspect of modern law enforcement no more intrusive than the sniffer dogs that routinely patrol airports and bus stations.

I don't see what the problem is. As long as the dogs stayed outside the car. If the weed scent permeated the air around the car to the extent that a dog could pick it up then that seems fair. But you have to figure that if they called in the K9 squad that they knew the guy was up to something.

They do make scentproof bags. Dumbass.

I'm generally opposed to any expansion of police searching rights, but my biggest problem with this is the waste. Sniffing dogs should be searching for explosives, not drugs.

You'd have trouble trying to hide anything from a dog. They can smell a flea fart at 100 paces. :biggrin:
Yes, prioritize the wars. :thumbsup:

The dogs are specialists, not generalists. Drug dogs find drugs, bomb dogs find bombs, and that cute little beagle finds illicit fruit.

In a legal sense, if the air around the vehicle is regarded in the same way for the dog as the visual field of a human officer is, the guy transporting the weed might as well have had it sitting on the seat next to him with a large sign on it saying "WEED."

Precisely. The dog trainers should be specializing the dogs in bombs, not drugs.

You're just upset over the price of weed going up after the 400 lb weed bust in Philadelphia ...

9-0 for the government. Little things like the Fourth Amendment are obselete in today's terrorist-filled world.

An important question is whether having the dog there in the first place is appropriate.

Bringing a drug dog to a standard traffic stop is highly dubious in my opinion.

Having the dog there means that either a) it was called in especially because the man was acting suspicious, or b) they were simply randomly searching vehicles that were pulled over. If the dog was called in, then hey, you fucked up and now you go to prison. Pot laws are draconian, but they are the laws, and that's a risk you take when you transport significant amounts of pot. Now, if they were randomly searching, then we've got a problem. Your car is subject to the same privacy laws as your home, AFAIK, and this is clearly an illegal search. It would also be interesting to see whether the man was actually intoxicated at the time of the stop (because, lets face it, if you traffic in pot it's probably because you smoke it, and if you smoke pot and have a whole bunch of it in the car, you're going to smoke that pot....lord knows I would). If he was blazed, even if he was very subtle about it and presented no problems to the officer, he's boned because the officer will say he 'suspected it enough to bring in the Pot Puppy, but not enough to go into the car'.

Edit: I wonder if they'll use the 'reasonable measures' precedent. Someone was arrested for growing herbage because a thermal scan on someone else's house just happened to catch his and saw a lot of activity. The court then ruled that since he had not taken "reasonable measures to protect his privacy", that the scan was akin to looking through an open window, and, therefore, legal. Why not use x-rays and make scanning anyone legal so long as their house isn't made of lead?

Ah, but you see, here is where they get you...

1) the drug dog just happened to be down the road and stopped by to visit/backup the other officer,

2) is it a breach of privacy if the aroma of cannibis just happens to waft across the nose of the dog who just happens to be there for no other reason than number 1?

Officers backing each other up is not a bad thing in my book, but if the dogs start showing up more prevelently now then, someone will probably end up shot or sued over it.

But that doesn't explain why the dog was taken oput of his cage and walked around the stopped car. The only reason to do that would be to search for whatever the dog was trained to find.

I understand and concur, but proving intent, which is crucial to prosecution, is the problem.

I don't like it either, and I'm one of the last people to be targeted for drug searches.

It's another step down the slippery slope.

In the paraphrased words of comedian Charlie Viracola, I'm one fo those people who may as well already have their pants off when they walk into the airport. I look unkempt and I often dance and sing in public places, so the establishment has been fucking with me since long before PATRIOT (of course, the same could be said for anyone who went to public high school...a friend of mine was stopped and had his bottle of water confiscated and sent to a drug lab because he was "looking tired and acting strangely" and they thought he had dissolved some sort of chemical in the water). The rest of you are just slowly entering my world of randomly being fucked with...I won't call it persecution, because I don't like to be that righteous, but they do love to screw with old Steve-o.

As a counterattack, I like to do little things like hand out union propaganda at McDonald's or steal all of the newspapers from the little vending machines and simply place them on top of the machine (Information Liberation...why should you have to pay someone just to know what's going on in the world?)....people say that if you're going to do the crime, you need to be prepared to do the time, but I always figured that if you're going to do the time anyway, you may as well do the crime to make it worth your while. If punishment is inevitable, make sure you deserve it.

[nitpik]
Information is free. It's the distribution medium you have to pay for. That's why listening to FM radio only costs you the radio. As for newspapers, there's all kinds of things you're paying for daily.
- someone to aquire the information and put it in a form the most readers will understand
- the aquisition of newsprint, ink and plastic thingies for home delivery
- the rent/cost/maintenance of the building these people and supplies are kept in
- the purchase/lease/maintenance of the machines that do the actual printing
- people to fold, package and prepare the newspapers for distribution
- the good folks who are up in the wee hours of the morning throwing newspapers into bushes, on the roof and, occasionally, onto the porch

Creating and distributing printed media is hardly cheap, regardless of what's being printed. That's why it costs a budget-busting 50 cents (around here) for a weekday newspaper. Sunday costs $1.50 because there's so much more paper and stuff in it. If a person takes out all the papers of the machine on one payment of $.50, the newspaper company takes a loss, the person makes it more expensive for the newspaper company to make and distribute the paper, then that same person will likely complain loudest when they raise prices to offset the loss.
[/nitpik]