Do the police need a warrant to bring a drug-sniffing dog to your front door? The U.S. Supreme Court will soon answer that question. The case, Florida v. Jardines, may even prompt the Court to reconsider its previous Fourth Amendment dog sniff cases, United States v. Place and Illinois v. Caballes. These two decisions had held that police don't need a warrant for a dog to sniff your luggage in an airport, or your car by the side of the road, finding that the sniffs are not "searches" under the Fourth Amendment. The logic is straightforward: since a sniff "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item," a search after a dog's alert cannot offend reasonable expectations of privacy. Of course, the logical flaw is equally obvious: police dogs often alert when drugs are not present, resulting in unnecessary suspicionless searches.
But do these cases track our intuitions about privacy? I recently conducted qualitative research based on the facts of Florida v. Jardines. The complete results appear in a new Stanford Law Review Online essay. I asked 187 law students whether contraband-detecting dog sniffs should be considered an invasion of privacy under a variety of false alert rates. Not surprisingly, the dogs' accuracy rates mattered significantly. Fewer than half believed that a perfectly accurate dog's sniff of a car constituted an invasion of privacy that should require a warrant or some reasonable suspicion. By comparison, two-thirds believed the sniff by the dog with a 10 percent false alert error rate needed a warrant.
But accuracy was not the only important factor; in fact, it wasn't even the most important factor. Unbeknownst to the students, the surveys randomly varied the type of contraband the dogs were trained to detect. Roughly one-third of the students responded to a hypothetical scenario involving a drug-sniffing dog, one-third responded to a bomb-sniffing dog, and one-third responded to a human cadaver-sniffing dog. Students' instincts about privacy were very sensitive to the type of criminal investigation. Those assigned to react to the drug-sniffing dog were much less tolerant of police practices. Fifty-six percent of respondents believed even the mythical perfectly accurate drug sniff constituted a Fourth Amendment search, while the corresponding rates for cadavers and bombs were 30 percent and 36 percent, respectively. The results probably reflect a shared skepticism about the efficacy and legitimacy of the "war on drugs." If the police use a dog to see if you're smoking marijuana at home, students think they should get a warrant -- but not if they're checking for dead bodies, or pipe bombs.
At present, courts do not consider the type of criminal investigation when deciding whether police conduct constitutes a search, and as a practical matter the distinction is futile. The contraband-sniffing dog is just a first-generation information-gathering tool. In time, a single instrument (possibly a drone) will detect drugs and bombs. If police conduct is sufficiently intrusive, it should not evade designation as a search simply because it is employed to achieve more worthwhile criminal enforcement goals. Conversely, unobtrusive investigatory practices should not be dismissed too quickly. Our implicit reaction to drug enforcement policies may prompt us to welcome a reversal of the previous dog sniff cases, but we may be overlooking the value of contraband-detecting technologies. Traditional suspicion-based policing is dependent on the discretion of police officers, which is prone to error and bias. Suspicionless screens, if they are used properly, redistribute the burdens of criminal investigation and punishment more equitably across the population. Our crime control policies are more likely to be carefully designed when they will apply to all of us. Police techniques that detect contraband can simultaneously improve crime detection and reduce law enforcement discretion (and, hence, potential abuse).
The Supreme Court should use the Jardines case to reconfigure Fourth Amendment analysis to accommodate both the old model of individualized suspicion and new models designed to decrease discretion. To be legitimate, these "suspicionless non-searches" should meet three criteria. The tool must have low error, be applied uniformly, and have negligible interference (that is, the tool itself should not cause adverse effects.) The dog sniff in Jardines fails all three of these elements, and there is little reason to believe dogs will ever produce a sufficiently low rate of error. But other processes and technologies have the potential to be what dogs never were -- accurate and fair. With luck, the Court will recognize a Fourth Amendment search in Jardines without creating a rule that reflexively obstructs the use of new technologies.
Oh, and we have the highest rates of incarcerated people in the world, partly due to the privatization of prisons, which should be enough to put them out of business. The prisons are for rapists, murderers and those who defy the wish of the public in order to further their own financial greed, such as the many crooked politicians.
Those who say they do have that right are the real criminals.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/24/senate_advances_expanded_orwellian_govt_surveillance
They confiscate your property and the burden of proof is on YOU. They then auction off the property they steal so can go skiing in Vail.
It's a racket the Mafia would run.
Besides these outright deceptions, there is the fact that the dog and trainer live together 24/7 and the dog wants to please his caretaker and carefully reads unconscious cues to get his master access to houses. Just as your pet knows you need a nuzzle sometimes, the policeman's dog knows how much joy master gets when he gets him inside the house AND doggie gets a treat, too!
So, until the dogs are housed like military working dogs, in kennels with no constant, single handler, the entire drug sniffing dog process of fatally flawed.
No. It's MUCH, MUCH worse, of course.
Marijuana prohibition was a fraud from its beginning in 1937, when perpetrated by soon-to-be-out-of-work alcohol prohibition bureaucrat, Harry Anslinger. Everything that was said about marijuana in the grand deliberations (lasting less than two hours) was a lie. They even lied about the American Medical Association approving of the prohibition. - See Professor Charles Whitebread's excellent speech on the subject to the California Judges Association:
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/History/whiteb1.htm
This crime against humanity has exacted a huge toll on the U.S. and the world. The fraudulent, counter-productive prohibition has NEVER accomplished even one positive thing - especially not a reduction in consumption. It has ONLY caused vast amounts of crime, violence, corruption, death, and the severe diminishment of EVERYONE'S freedom.
More than 800,000 innocent Americans are arrested for simple marijuana possession each year and made second-class citizens FOR LIFE. They will forever face huge obstacles to decent employment, education, travel, housing, government benefits, and will always go into court with one strike against them. They can even have their CHILDREN taken away. 20 million Americans are now locked away in this very un-American sub-class. That has a horrible effect on the whole country, being an incredible waste of human potential.
There is NO domestic issue more important than ending what is essentially the American Inquisition.
Marijuana OTC
Like theonetwo says, for every law more and more time and resourses are wasted amending and rearranging it while constitutional rights hang in limbo, are violated, or ignored.
Really
If a police officer were in an apartment complex and he smelled a strong odor of natural gas coming from an apartment, and heard a small child's voice crying for help, he couldn't kick in the door based on exigent circumstances?
Where does it say that only ocular proof suffices for a search without a warrant?