Drug dog searches are unconstitutional (at a suspect's house).
Washington, DC - The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police cannot bring drug-sniffing police dogs onto a suspect's property to look for evidence without first getting a warrant for a search, a decision which may limit how investigators use dogs' sensitive noses to search out drugs, explosives and other items hidden from human sight, sound and smell.
By a 5-4 vote, the high court upheld a Florida ruling that suppressed evidence found in a marijuana possession case, after a police drug-sniffing dog was brought near a home and alerted officers. The Florida court rejected the evidence, saying officers did not have probable cause to use the dog.
In the majority opinion in Florida v. Jardines, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that a house and its surroundings have Fourth Amendment protections, and noted that the homeowner in the case had not given permission to the police to use the dog.
Justice Antonin Scalia said a person has the Fourth Amendment right to be free from the government's gaze inside their home and in the area surrounding it, which is called the curtilage.
"The police cannot, without a warrant based on probable cause, hang around on the lawn or in the side garden, trawling for evidence and perhaps peering into the windows of the home," Justice Antonin Scalia said for the majority. "And the officers here had all four of their feet and all four of their companion's, planted firmly on that curtilage – the front porch is the classic example of an area intimately associated with the life of the home."
"To find a visitor knocking on the door is routine (even if sometimes unwelcome); to spot that same visitor exploring the front path with a metal detector, or marching his bloodhound into the garden before saying hello and asking permission, would inspire most of us to — well, call the police," Scalia wrote.
"We think a typical person would find it `a cause for great alarm' to find a stranger snooping about his front porch with or without a dog," Scalia said. "The dissent would let the police do whatever they want by way of gathering evidence so long as they stay on the base path, to use a baseball analogy – so long as they `stick to the path that is typically used to approach a front door, such as a paved walkway.' From that vantage point they can presumably peer into the house with binoculars with impunity. That is not the law, as even the state concedes."
In a dissenting opinion, Justice Samuel Alito noted that a police officer also detected the smell of marijuana upon approaching the house. "The conduct of the police officer in this case did not constitute a trespass and did not violate respondent's reasonable expectations of privacy," Alito wrote.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan voted with Scalia in the majority. Dissenting along with Alito were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer.
SCOTUSblog has more on the case.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/26/drug-sniffing-dogs-unconstitutional-search_n_2956079.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/03/26/175359576/drug-sniffing-dog-case-fails-supreme-courts-smell-test?f=1001&ft=1
What is the state of the Jones trespass test After Florida v. Jardines?
http://www.volokh.com/2013/03/27/what-is-the-state-of-the-jones-trespass-test-after-florida-v-jardines/