The most troubling thing about the drug-sniffing case is that only the dog’s master knows when he’s been alerted to the presence of drugs. A cop with a dog can fake a alert and trigger a full-on search with near impunity. Not to mention that, as Justice Souter noted in his dissent, drug-sniffing dogs have proven error rates of anywhere between 12 and 60%.

That in mind, I got the following email yesterday in responses to my Fox column:

I was defending a guy back in the eighties (I’m an attorney) and decided to conduct an experiment. I sent two Hispanic investigators (former Miami homicide cops) and had them go to Georgia and “troll” a certain stretch of Interstate highway where a State Trooper in a rural area was known for interdicting drug couriers.

Not only were my investigators stopped (they drove a Miami tag rental car); they were arrested because they wouldn’t give “consent” to search the vehicle. A dog was called in and it “positively alerted” to drugs, a local magistrate signed a seach warrant, and the car was literally torn apart. It wasn’t until the dummies discovered a video camera in the trunk, that they all disappeared and released my investigators.

The video replay showed a newspaper, with the date, and it scanned the trunk to show it was empty (we were afraid of them planting drugs), with the investigators explaining to the camera that they were conducting an experiment for attorney ________.

I cringed when I read the Supreme Court decision allowing dogs to provide probable cause to search. My police friends tell me they can get a dog to alert to a comic book.

God help us all.

[This case was actually reported in a front page article in the Atlanta Constitution circa 1985.]

Personally, I find it interesting that Justice Stevens can find and vigourously defend a federally-guaranteed right to an abortion deep within the penumbras of the Fourth Amendment (which was clearly written to protect us from baseless searches), but not a right to be free from invasive drug searches triggered by dogs.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 1st, 2005 at 7:27 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.