Supreme Court says police dogs can sniff cars

Supreme Court says police dogs can sniff cars

Opponents worry about privacy, intrusive searches

By CHRISTIAN DANIELSEN / Aggie Staff Writer

Posted 02/09/2005

If you're pulled over with an illegal drug in your car, hiding it somewhere and keeping cool might be enough to fool a police officer.

Probably not the drug dog, though.

In a 6-2 decision last month, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that if a police dog sniffs something questionable in a car during a traffic stop, police can search it, even if the stop is for something as simple as a broken taillight.

At issue are the concepts of "probable cause" and "reasonable suspicion," murky legal standards that police must meet in order to perform non-consensual searches.

The defendant in the case, Roy Caballes, was pulled over in Illinois in 1999 for driving 6 mph over the speed limit. The officer who pulled him over noted Caballes' nervousness and that he had an air freshener in the car. After Caballes refused a search, the officer was set to issue a simple warning ticket.

During the encounter, however, a second officer arrived on the scene with a police dog and circled Caballes' car. The dog alerted at the trunk, at which point the officers searched it and found almost 300 pounds of marijuana inside.

Caballes received a 12-year prison sentence, a conviction upheld all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court, which ruled the dog sniff "unjustifiably enlarged the scope of a routine traffic stop into a drug investigation."

On Jan. 25, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed.

In the court's majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that citizens have no right to expect privacy for illegal substances.

"A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the Fourth Amendment," he wrote.

According to UC Davis law professor Jennifer Chacone, the decision is the latest in a series of rulings to weaken the Fourth Amendment's right against unreasonable search and seizure.

"I see it as a general decline of protections, in light of the notion of the Fourth Amendment allowing people to be left alone," she said. "It certainly gives certain police departments more leeway to conduct sniffs or searches."

Chacone also voiced concern over police using the decision unfairly against minority groups.

"There are several studies that document people are far more likely to be pulled over if they're black or Latino," she said. "The likelihood of those groups being sucked into the net of these dog searches much more easily…is an inescapable possibility."

While several law enforcement groups applauded the decision, civil libertarian groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union are upset over what they see as an overreach of power.

"The concern with this case is that it has changed the nature of every traffic stop," said Ed Yohnka, director of communications for the Illinois ACLU. "Police are now able to go ahead and bring in something intrusive like a drug-sniffing dog or something else as routine."

"Even with no indication of illegal activity, thousands of people stopped every day could be subject to a menacing search," he continued.

Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed, as both issued lengthy dissenting opinions in the case. Breyer cited evidence that drug dogs sometimes alert falsely, and that 80 percent of U.S. currency has drug residue on it.

"In practical terms, the evidence is clear that the dog that alerts hundreds of times will be wrong dozens of times," he wrote.

Ginsburg also warned that the ruling could give police a green light to perform dog searches of cars in parking lots, or even of people on the street.

But according to Davis Police Department spokesperson Lieutenant Darren Pytel, the use of a drug-sniffing dog would be "very, very rare" during a traffic stop. He also said a dog usually isn't necessary to tip an officer off that there might be drugs in a car.

"Most of the time an officer would be dealing with marijuana, which they can smell [on their own] anyway," he said. "That's actually pretty common."

Pytel noted that police already use dogs to sniff luggage at airports and perform sweeps at events with important people in attendance. He also said the possibility of police using dogs in parking lots or on the street in general is unlikely.

"I don't want to say 'no, it won't ever happen,'" he said, "but we have no plans to do that, and this decision doesn't affect our day-to-day operations at all."



CHRISTIAN DANIELSEN can be reached at city [at] californiaaggie.com.