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]

I was just going to respond "goddamn communist hippie" but you were a lot more eloquent.

I am still trying to figure out why we still have honor boxes when there doesn't seem to be much left ... it must cost more to develop and maintain a device that will provide one paper per payment than the newspapers lose in inventory.

The guy who maintained the honor boxes at my college wrote on the glass windows of all of them ... "PLEASE DON'T STEAL MY LIVELYHOOD."

I don't know if anyone ever listened, but I thought that perhaps that does indicate that the boxes are individually maintained rather than by the newspaper itself ... that it's a concession, and by taking all the papers out of the box you're zinging one struggling guy rather than the big evil corporation.

I have a hard time believing that I will end up bankrupting USA Today. The reasons you stated are why I don't liberate local papers (though the only decent one, the Pittsburgh City Paper, is already free so that doesn't matter much). Also, do keep in mind that those reasons I stated are simply a flimsy defense mechanism I've constructed to justify why I do this...it's more just for the fun of screwing with someone more powerful than me, and for the fun little bonus that I imagine other people get when they don't have to drop the 50p to pick up their daily paper. It's like finding a quarter in the change return of a pay phone: it makes no difference whatsoever, but it's just kinda nice.

I enjoy screwing with powerful people as much as the next person, but I kinda draw the line at taking something that doesn't belong to me (whether it's as a gift to others or not). If you find a quarter in phone, that's different--somebody left it there, it's there for the taking. I don't know, I guess it's just the whole karma thing. If I steal a newspaper, somebody will steal the stereo out of my car. Maybe it's just how I've trained myself, but it certainly keeps me out of trouble. :3eye:

That's funny cos when I was a paperboy, sometimes I would find the boxes shorted. That pissed me off so I would randomly shoot people on the way home.

It didn't solve the problem but it did make me feel better.

Actually now that I think about it - if I came across a paper box with the papers lying on top of it, I'd pay the 50 cents to open the box, put the papers back in it, and take the one on top.

Now that I know it's really a strike back against "the man", maybe I'll behave differently.

Due to some complicated shennanigans at UPS, I just got a second shipment of clothes from Cabela's that I was not charged for. AFAIK, Cabela's is taking the hit, because their packaging failed. Meanwhile, the honest folks at UPS scooped up the errant clothes from their floor, along with the packing slip, put 2+2 together and now I've got twice as many chamois shirts as I wanted.

Yeah, the thought crossed my mind that I could keep them and be in the clear, but that would mean that my integrity could be bought for the bargain basement price of ?$95.00.

There are a lot of ways to justify stealing, but ultimately it is still stealing and when you are making up your rationalizations it is the same thing as preaching to the choir.

If Cabela's tells me "no sweat keep the threads. they're on us." I won't force the cash on them, but it is really their call, not mine. I'd rather send them back or pay for them.

So you can ask yourself: Is your integrity worth only $0.50?

From June 11, 1996 - Washington, DC, USA

Minor traffic stops can be used as justification for detaining motorists and searching their vehicles for drugs, ruled the Supreme Court in an unanimous decision. Critics argue that the ruling will encourage police to use phony pretexts to invade the privacy of motorists -- particularly minorities -- while proponents maintain that it provides law enforcement with an additional weapon to combat illicit drugs.

And from Federal Appeals Court Rules Traffic Stop Drug Dog Search Illegal 12/5/03
The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that police may not detain motorists until a drug-sniffing dog arrives unless they have a reasonable suspicion that some crime has been committed. The ruling came in the case of Jody James Boyce, a New Jersey man who was pulled over for a traffic violation on I-95 in Georgia in 2001, issued a warning ticket by Officer David Edwards, but then detained until a drug dog could arrive after he refused to consent to a vehicle search. The drug dog signaled that drugs were present, police recovered 10,000 ecstasy tablets and two large containers of marijuana, and Boyce was subsequently convicted of possession with intent to distribute the drugs and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

First you say you will, then you won't.
First you say you do, then you don't.
You're driving, me out of my mind. :bonk:

See what drugs will do? Just talking about reefer and I go off on a wild tangent.

It's perfectly legal to stop and search a commercial motor vehicle (tractor-trailer) for drugs or anything else with NO reasonable suspicion. It's written into the laws governing licensing. Sucks, but there it is.

The laws vary from state to state. In Pennsylvania a search warrant is required to search a vehicle unless there is quite probable cause.

True, but PA will not only detain you while they get that warrant, if they deem your location a traffic hazard (like anywhere along the side of the turnpike) they'll tow your rig into their station. Tractor and trailer, hook 'em up, head 'em out. :eek3:

Interesting posts are never unwelcome, even wild tangents. :)

I think it depends on the paper. When I was in college I had a route for a while distributing the Boulder Daily Camera to various machines throughout town. All I did was put the papers in the machines (I didn't take the money out), and I was paid a flat fee per week by the newspaper - didn't matter how well or poorly the machines did.

I thought I made it abundantly clear, from the beginning, that I'm full of shit and I acknowledge that the reasons are defense mechanisms for justification. To be frank, this is just something I do because I'm bored and have a lot of unresolved, directionless anger. It's fun for me, non-destructive, and if you want to pay the 50p to put the papers back and save the world from me, have a blast!

Actually, you are talking in a straight line. It's the drug laws that go off on wild tangents.

Non-destructive? Don'think so IMHO.

And in Louisiana, when they tow a vehicle to the station, the get to do a search for "inventory" purposes, and thus it's not technically a search.