Slashdot Mirror
Supreme Court Rules Extending Traffic Stop For Dog Sniff Unconstitutional
bmxeroh writes: The Supreme Court ruled today (PDF) that a police officer may not extend a traffic stop beyond the time needed to complete the tasks related to that stop for the purposes of allowing a trained dog to sniff for drugs. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority (6-3) that police authority "ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed." The case, Rodriguez v. United States, 13-9972, all started with Rodriguez was stopped in Nebraska for driving out of his lane. After he was given the ticket for that infraction, he was made to wait an additional seven to eight minutes for a drug dog to arrive which promptly alerted to the presence of drugs in the car. Upon search, the officers found a small bag of methamphetamine in his possession.
To be honest, I figured that it /had/ to be a bad ruling and spent a while trying to understand why it was wrong, just because of how they've been lately. Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
Your rights on line is a catch all for .. well, your legal rights.
Maybe you don't care, but many of us actually do care that law enforcement has been shitting on the Constitution for years and deciding the law is what they say it is.
Police offices these days are crooks who reinterpret the law as they choose. And it's about time it became acknowledged that it's not how it is supposed to be. Police who are doing these things should be fired without a pension, and criminally charged.
You may not give a shit about your 4th amendment rights, but other people do.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...in a pretty blatant violation of the 4th. Pretty scary even though the case was won.
IANAL but from what I gather is basically the dissent is that the violation of the 4th isn't that *unreasonable* so it's ok.
(not to mention drug dogs are complete BS anyway)
It's unreasonable search.
Say you get pulled over for a busted tail light, and the cop notices a corpse in your back seat. That's OK.
Say he says 'Ho-lee sheeeit, smells like dead body. Pop your trunk open.' And hey, there's a dead body in the trunk. That's OK.
But he can't say 'I done pulled you over for a busted tail light, but I'mma search your car for a corpse, even though I have no reason to believe there's any corpses.' Not reasonable.
Now, this guy gets pulled over for lane swerve. Fine. Cop can sniff his breath, look for signs of intoxication. Cop can eyeball the seats through the window, the ashtray, looking for booze bottles, roaches, whatever. But he can't say 'I have no real reason to, but I'm turning this traffic stop into a drug stop, *but first I need to call in extra equipment.* That's unreasonable.
If he'd happened to have had the dog with him, and decided to have the dog give the car a once-over, fine. Although I question the validity of dog searches; we know that animals can pick up on clues to what their owners want. See the Clever Hans phenomena. If the cop wants to search the car, the dog might just pick up on that and alert.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
The dogs are demonstrably a placebo that "triggers" when the handling cop signals the dog to do so.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I'm too lazy to add anchor tags, but here are some references for you.
The UCDavis study is the best description of this -- when actually tested in scenarios designed to expose false positive results, that's EXACTLY what happened -- the dogs alerted in every place they shouldn't have and where the handler was given cues that the dogs would alert, the dogs were MORE likely to alert.
This is a huge problem with using dogs. It's not that dogs aren't good at sniff detection, its that dogs are so inclined to please their handlers that even when the handlers aren't purposefully lying they are still signaling their dogs that they should find something. So how do you separate out the dog actually sniffing out drugs versus the experienced profiling of the handler who expects their target to have drugs, gets a false alert from the dog and then discovers drugs from a hand search?
I don't think we CAN know if it was a legitimate signal from the dog or just the officer's experience that $Socialtype or $MinorityMember is very likely to have drugs.
It gets much, much worse if you take away the assumption that the cops/handler are 100% honest all the time. Do you really think that there isn't even some deliberate dishonesty with dogs? The worst outcome for the cops has been "well, the dog knows you had something in here but since I didn't find anything I'll let you go". The best outcome for the cops is that they get away with an illegal search that results in an arrest and conviction based on a dog's behavior that is beyond question, because, you know, dogs are so good at sniffing and its "a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/w...
http://www.cato.org/blog/cleve...
This was *already* the law, from a Supreme Court Case in 2005. Some of the lower courts had just messed it up by not following it--basically saying that a couple of minutes is okay and doesn't really count.
SCOTUS just benchslapped them, although politely. This is one of those "No, we actually meant what we said, now stop being so pro-law-enforcement that you read this out of the law. Yes. They're criminals. But there's still a Constitution, and you have to follow it."