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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.
The dissenters' statements agree in principle with the majority but cite reasons that the majority's opinion is in error in this case, i.e. that there was reasonable cause to call in the dog and that the delay was not excessive.
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You're a fucking idiot. Did you know that these dogs can be trained to alert on cash? You know, the cash you might have in the car because you just sold your motorcycle like I did last October. Do you know what happens when the cops find cash? They steal it from you under the pretense that you MIGHT have been involved in a drug transaction or some other nefarious crime. Civil Forfeiture Laws are a thing and this ruling will help protect the innocent from those who would police for profit. Sit. Stay. Moron. P.
...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 time we repeal the Fourth Amendment. Police need to be able to find all the criminals using any means necessary. Won't someone please think of the children!!
(And if you post arguments against this proposal, I'll push to repeal the First Amendment as well)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you have never put a wheel over a lane marker I guess you can be as sanctimonious as you want.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
We need to be able to station soldiers in people's houses to prevent crime in the first place.
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.
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The handler doesn't even need to signal the dog. The handler might just want to search the car, and the dog picks up on unconscious cues, and alerts.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Police who are doing these things should be fired without a pension, and criminally charged.
I've been saying this for years, more or less. When a civil servant, from the town dog catcher to president of the US, breaks a law, or writes a law they should be held accountable.
In the case of a police officer when they interpret the law wrong there should be repercussions. When a politician sponsors a bill and its found unconstitutional, there should be repercussions. When a DA files charges against someone and loses, there should be repercussions.
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Just because the supreme court says you cant, doesnt mean departments wont push the envelope to see if they can challenge it, and for how long. Most minorities arrested for example never see a courtroom, but instead are strong-armed. Typically a prosecutor meets with the accused, threatens them with a dozen or so charges from failure to yield to a stop sign to improper socks after labour day and throws a random double digit integer of years in a prison described like Auschwitz. Once the accused is terrified into pleading guilty for a "reduced sentence" the prosecutor packs up their briefcase and bellies up to the local pub assured he will get to keep his job. Prosecutors that are fair and pursue lenient charges tend to prevent the DA and Judges from getting re-elected, and will eventually get shown the door.
Good people go to bed earlier.
(not to mention drug dogs are complete BS anyway)
OK, I'll bite. Why are drug dogs "complete BS"? Dogs are demonstrably useful and effective in sniffing out all sorts of items. They are a well established tool in our legal system and for good reason. Clearly there was no probable cause to use a drug dog for a search in this case. That does not make drug sniffing dogs "complete BS".
It doesn't look like he was under the influence at the time, but the term "driving out of his lane" does kind of give reasonable cause for drug use, but maybe thats profiling.
The problem with this logic is that it fails the "prior probability" test.
Suppose a policeman searches and finds the suspect carrying a large amount of cash, say $4000. That's consistent with a (supposed) drug purchase, so the cash can be confiscated under asset forfeiture laws (assets used in the commission of a crime).
Suppose a policeman notes a youtube video of a chemistry experiment showing a balance scale, some beakers, and jars of chemicals. Those are consistent with "meth lab", so the policeman can search and confiscate all the equipment in the poster's house (this has happened).
The problem with each of these, and your position, is that there is significant prior probability that the behaviour in question is *not* indicative of criminal activity. You are reversing the conditional probabilities.
To put it in words, you are equating "probability of driving out-of-lane, given that he's on drugs" (quite high), with "probability that he's using drugs, given out-of-lane driving" (actually, quite low).
People temporarily drive out-of-lane a great deal to avoid animals and small obstacles, and people temporarily drive out-of-lane because they're distracted. The number of people out-of-lane because they're on drugs is vanishingly small.
Taken to extremes (and we know the police will do this), pretty-much *any* behaviour can be considered consistent with drug use.
In the case of the home lab above, it doesn't matter that the poster is missing key components, nor that he only has some of the ingredients. "Meth makers use glassware, he's got glassware, therefore he's a meth maker".
You see where this leads?
If a policeman observes a crime, take the appropriate action - that's fine. If he *observes* another crime while dealing with it, that's fine too.
But that's not a justification to rummage around in a person's rights just to see what can be pinned on the suspect.
If he doesn't observe a crime, he shouldn't go looking for one.
Drug sniffing dogs are no more addicted to drugs than bomb sniffing dogs are addicted to explosives, cash sniffing dogs addicted to cash or cadaver sniffing dogs addicted to dead people. Seriously, dogs have keen noses and will find whatever they are trained to find. The rumor that dogs are turned into drug addicts in order to find drugs is pure unadulterated bullshit.
Except this one cash sniffing dog I saw -- gold grills; Rolex; diamond studs in his ears as large as dog biscuits...
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All it does is create a very slim frame up where you can't wait for another unit to arrive, because you announced you where done with the ticket.
No, this creates a reasonableness test for a dog search without probable cause. If tickets are normally handled in 5 minutes and the officer suddenly takes 45 minutes to issue a ticket and it just so happens the drug dog shows up in 44 minutes, well then that's outside the ruling. This is where video evidence will be important, defense attorneys can establish that an average stop takes X minutes, and only stops where they want to request a drug dog without cause take X + n minutes. The cops can either slow down all stops (and get less revenue), or they can stop using drug dogs without probable cause because they can't jerk people around waiting for a dog to do a no warrant search.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The guy was clearly driving while hispanic, with another count of driving while poor, so that's clearly suspicious cause for a search.
http://nevergetbusted.com/nevergetbusted-tips/university-study-tricked-certified-police-dogs-to-false-alert-200-times/
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=40028
http://www.wayne-county-forfeiture.com/content/drug-dogs-and-false-alerts-police-lie-and-dogs-wont-sniff-out-perjury
IMO, never read an article about a SCOTUS opinion. Always read the opinion itself. They are not difficult to find and not difficult to read.
No, it really doesn't.
Maybe the driver was futzing with their cell phone. Maybe their eyesight has degraded but they still have a license. Maybe there was something in the road that the officer didn't see. Maybe there was a bee in the car. Maybe the passenger grabbed the wheel. Maybe the vehicle is malfunctioning (say, headlights are out). Maybe the driver hit a pothole. Maybe the lines were unclear, having been repainted. Maybe the driver was falling asleep.
The core issue here was that the police officer was finished with the traffic stop. Then he asked to do a search, and the driver refused, and then he detained the driver.
You can't detain someone longer than is reasonable (4th Amendment), and the decision says it's only reasonable to detain someone as long as it takes to complete the traffic stop (a definition established in Illinois v. Caballes in 2005). So case law says that the 4th Amendment's "reasonable" means "as long as it takes to finish the traffic stop." By the officer's own admission, the traffic stop was complete. Since nothing incriminating had been discovered by that point, that makes further detention or search unreasonable, and that makes the it all unconstitutional.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Yo Nerds -- you really need to at least glance at the decision before you all start condemning/praising the decision. In reality, this case is a big nothing-burger and does nothing to promote civil rights in America. The entire "meat" of the decision is in this paragraph:
What does this mean? It means that the officer was honest/stupid enough to say during the original trial that he had no "individualized suspicion" about this particular vehicle or this particular defendant. All the cop had to do was "articulate" an "individualized suspicion" about why he wanted to search the car with a drug-sniffing dog, and the whole case would have turned out differently. As it is, the case just gets remanded back to the lower court to look into the issue some more. Basically, the Supreme Court is inviting the 8th Circuit to come back with a finding that the cop probably had a reason to suspect drugs, and therefore everything was fine. This is anything but a sweeping victory for civil rights.
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."