By Jacob Sullum Source: Reason Magazine Police used to need probable cause to search the trunk of your car. Now all they need is a dog. Here's how it works: An officer pulls you over because you're driving a bit too fast or a bit too slow, or because you have a broken tail light, or because you're not wearing your seat belt, or because you forgot to put your new registration sticker on your license plate. He is soon joined by another officer with a drug-sniffing dog, which "alerts" when it gets near your trunk. Or so the officers say. You have no idea what this particular dog does when it smells contraband, and the dog isn't talking. But now the police can look in your trunk. A minor traffic stop is thus transformed into an embarrassing, invasive, intimidating, time-consuming search for illegal drugs. The Supreme Court recently gave its approval to this sort of stop-and-switch in a case involving a man named Roy Caballes, who was pulled over on Interstate 80 by an Illinois state trooper for driving six miles an hour faster than the speed limit. Caballes happened to have 282 pounds of marijuana in his trunk, but even those of us who are not pot smugglers should worry that the Court saw nothing wrong with the circumstances that led to his arrest. Trooper Daniel Gillette testified that he became suspicious because Caballes was well-dressed and seemed nervous, the car smelled of air freshener, and the only visible belongings were two sport coats, even though Caballes said he was moving from Las Vegas to Chicago. Gillette asked for permission to search the car, which Caballes, not surprisingly, declined to grant. Gillette got permission from a dog instead. Trooper Craig Graham, upon hearing Gillette call in the stop, decided to swing by with a drug-sniffing canine, conveniently arriving just as Gillette was writing Caballes a warning ticket. For Caballes, one sniff by that dog was the difference between a warning and a 12-year prison sentence. But according to the Supreme Court, the sniff was not a search. "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," wrote Justice John Paul Stevens for the six-member majority. The decision built on a 1983 ruling that said "subjecting luggage to a 'sniff test' by a well-trained narcotics detection dog does not constitute a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment" because it "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item." In other words, the only privacy interest it violates is a drug smuggler's desire to conceal his stash, which is not protected by the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures." This argument is based on a myth. As Justice David Souter, one of two dissenters in Illinois v. Caballes, pointed out, "the infallible dog...is a creature of legal fiction." Souter cited examples from court cases of dogs with error rates of up to 38 percent. "Dogs in artificial testing situations return false positives anywhere from 12.5 to 60% of the time," he added. In short, it is simply not true that a drug-sniffing dog "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics." Even leaving aside the possibility of deliberate deception or honest error by police officers eager to turn a hunch into probable cause, the dogs themselves make mistakes, responding to subconscious cues from their handlers, alerting to food or residual odors of drugs that are no longer present, mistaking items associated with drugs for the drugs themselves, and so on. Whatever the cause of a false alert, it exposes innocent people to the inconvenience and humiliation of drug searches they have done nothing to justify. Now that the Court has said police need no special reason to bring in the dogs, provided they are otherwise complying with the law, such searches will become more common, and they need not be limited to routine traffic stops. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the other dissenter in this case, warned that the Court's analysis "clears the way for suspicionless, dog-accompanied drug sweeps of parked cars along sidewalks and in parking lots," even of cars stopped at traffic lights. If you happen to be caught in such a dragnet, just keep telling yourself it's not really a search. Note: The Supreme Court did, by declaring a sniff is not a search. Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason and the author of Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use (Tarcher/Putnam). Source: Reason Magazine (US) Author: Jacob Sullum Published: January 28, 2005 Copyright: 2005 The Reason Foundation Contact: letters@reason.com Website: http://www.reason.com/ Link to article: http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread20172.shtml
By Radley Balko Source: Fox News Network This week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that if you're pulled over by the police for speeding or, say, not wearing your seatbelt, they may bring out drug-sniffing dogs to investigate your car without violating the Fourth Amendment. On the Volokh Conspiracy blog, Orin Kerr observes that Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, indicated that the Fourth Amendment protects not against violations of privacy or invasiveness, but against violation of property rights. Since one can't have property rights for illicit drugs, a search can't violate the Fourth Amendment. It's a troubling precedent. It's hard to see how any police search would violate any rights under Justice Stevens' ruling, so long as the search turned up something illegal. That sort of undermines what the Fourth Amendment is all about. That case is just the latest in a number of court rulings and pieces of legislation that have been chipping away at the criminal justice rights of substance-abuse suspects. Ours is quickly becoming a two-tiered criminal justice system, one in which there are one set of criminal protections for drug and alcohol defendants, and a broader set of protections for everyone else. Last month in Virginia, pain physician Dr. William Hurwitz was convicted on dozens of counts of drug distribution. Prosecutors and the foreman of the jury that convicted him conceded that Hurwitz didn't knowingly participate in a drug trade, but because the pain medication he prescribed made it to the black market, he was nevertheless found guilty. He faces life in prison. Proving intent - as is required to secure a conviction in nearly every other crime - apparently wasn't necessary. The drug war has been eating at the Bill of Rights since its inception. Asset forfeiture laws, for example, allow law enforcement to seize the assets of suspected drug dealers before they're ever convicted of a crime. Even if the defendant is acquitted or the charges are dropped, the mere presence of an illicit substance in a car or home can mean the loss of the property, on the bizarre, novel legal principle that property can be guilty of a crime. Thanks to mandatory minimum sentencing laws, a judge in Utah recently had no choice but to sentence a first-time marijuana dealer to 55 years in prison (he had a pistol strapped to his ankle during the one-time deal, though he never brandished it). Frustrated but hamstrung by drug laws, the judge in the case noted that just hours earlier, he had sentenced a convicted murderer to just 22 years for beating an elderly woman to death with a log. Courts have carved out a "drug war exemption" in the Bill of Rights for multiple search and seizure scenarios, privacy, wiretapping, opening your mail, highway profiling, and posse comitatus - the forbidden use of the U.S. military for domestic policing. The other area where criminal protections are withering in the face of substance-abuse hysteria is in Driving Under the Influence or Driving While Intoxicated cases. The most notable example is the 1990 case of Michigan vs. Sitz, where the Supreme Court ruled that the problem of drunk driving was so pervasive, the Court could allow "random sobriety checkpoints" in which cops stop motorists without probable cause and give them breath tests, a practice that would otherwise again violate the Fourth Amendment. The Court has since ruled that the urgency of the drunken driving problem gives states the option to legislate away a motorist's Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial and his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. In 2002, the Supreme Court of Wisconsin ruled that police officers could forcibly extract blood from anyone suspected of drunk driving. Other courts have ruled that prosecutors aren't obligated to provide defendants with blood or breath test samples for independent testing, even though both could be done relatively easily. State legislatures have pounced on these rulings. The state of Washington just passed two laws remarkable in their disdain for everything our criminal justice system is supposed to represent. The first instructs juries in drunk driving cases to consider the evidence "in a light most favorable to the prosecution," an evidentiary standard that's unheard of anywhere else in criminal law. The second mandates that breath test evidence be admissible, no matter what - even if the defense can prove that the breath test machine was broken, or jiggered toward higher readings. Last year, Pennsylvanian Keith Emerich had his license revoked by state authorities after he revealed to his doctor during an emergency room visit that he sometimes drinks a six-pack of beer per day. His doctor reported him. Emerich wasn't accused or charged with drunk driving. In a bizarre twist on the principle of "presumption of innocence," Emerich must now prove to the state that he doesn't drive after drinking before he can get his license back. More and more states are taking advantage of the Supreme Court's granted exemption to a right to a jury trial for DUI-DWI suspects, particularly in states where judges are elected, not appointed. That, of course, is because elected judges deemed insufficiently harsh on such defendants can have their "leniency" used against them when it comes time for re-election. Though no such bill has yet to be signed into law, several state legislatures have also now considered bills that would mandate ignition interlock devices in every car sold in the state. New Mexico's version of the law would require all drivers to blow into a tube before starting their car, then again every ten minutes while driving. Drivers over the legal limit would not be able to start their cars or, if already on the road, given a window of time to pull over. Onboard computer systems would keep data on each test, which service centers would download once a month or so and send to law enforcement officials for evaluation. The problem, as Thomas Jefferson famously said, is that the natural process of things is for liberty to yield and for government to gain ground. It would take a rare and brave politician to stand up and say that we need to roll back or reconsider our drug laws, or that it's unfair to give accused murderers or rapists more rights than we give DWI defendants. But that's exactly what needs to happen. Radley Balko maintains a Weblog at: http://www.TheAgitator.com/ Newshawk: Paul Armentano Source: Fox News Network (US) Author: Radley Balko Published: Thursday, January 27, 2005 Copyright: Fox News Network Website: http://www.foxnews.com/ Comments: foxnewsonline@foxnews.com Link to article: http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread20169.shtml