{"id":8306,"date":"2013-01-31T15:45:19","date_gmt":"2013-01-31T15:45:19","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2013-01-31T15:45:19","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=8306","title":{"rendered":"Reason.com: “This Dog Can Send You to Jail; How cops and their canines manufacture probable cause”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reason.com: This Dog Can Send You to Jail; How cops and their canines manufacture probable cause<\/a> by Jacob Sullum:<\/p>\n

Robert J. Burns, a 55-year-old retired nurse who lives in St. Louis, was returning from a trip to the West Coast last October when his white Nissan pickup truck was pulled over on Interstate 40 near Amarillo. Burns was carrying a 12-foot aluminum fishing boat on top of the truck, and he had been struggling against high winds that kept pushing him toward the shoulder. The sheriff\u2019s deputy who stopped him thought he might be drunk.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe asked me to step out and come back to his car,\u201d Burns says, \u201cand that\u2019s when I noticed the dog in the back seat, a yellowish Lab. I explained that I hadn\u2019t been drinking and my getting on the shoulder of the road was strictly from the wind. He said that he was going to write me a warning, and I said, \u2018OK, that\u2019s fine.\u2019 He asked me if I had any drugs in the car. I said, \u2018No, sir, I don\u2019t do drugs, and I don\u2019t associate with people who do.\u2019 He asked me would I mind if he searched my vehicle, and I said, \u2018Well, yes, I would mind if you searched my vehicle.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

But thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, the deputy did not have to take no for an answer. In the 2005 case Illinois v. Caballes, the Court declared that \u201cthe use of a well-trained narcotics-detection dog\u2026during a lawful traffic stop generally does not implicate legitimate privacy interests.\u201d So the deputy was free to walk his dog around Burns\u2019 truck. \u201cHe got out with this dog and went around the car, two or three times,\u201d Burns says. \u201cHe came back and said the dog had \u2018passively alerted\u2019 on my vehicle.\u201d Burns, who is familiar with drug-detecting dogs from his work as an M.P. at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1970s, was puzzled. Properly trained police dogs are supposed to indicate the presence of drugs with a clear, objectively verifiable signal, such as sitting down in front of an odor\u2019s source or scratching at it. Yet \u201cthe dog never sat down, the dog never scratched, the dog never did anything that would indicate to me that it thought there was something in there.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Ron White opined: “What’s the sign of his alert? A blank stare?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}