South Dakota Supreme Court ruling, limits police interrogation of interstate travelers.

The South Dakota Supreme Court on Wednesday limited the ability of police to search and interrogate innocent interstate travelers absent a reasonable and articulable suspicion of wrongdoing. The court considered the unique case of a vehicle search not made pursuant to a traffic stop, but while the owner was being detained before entering his vehicle. The ruling was based on a February 26, 2008 incident at an Interstate 90 rest stop near Spearfish. Sean Haar had parked his Subaru Outback at 3:20pm and went into the building to take a break. While inside, South Dakota Highway Patrolman Brian Swets pulled up on the scene, spotted the Illinois license plate on the Subaru, and parked in such a way as to block the vehicle from leaving.
Swets freely admitted that the Subaru had committed no traffic violations, there were no signs of intoxication and there was no odor coming from the car. Instead, he found the cargo carrier, lack of luggage and the Illinois license plate to be highly suspicious. "We fail to see... how a cargo box, the lack of visible luggage in a vehicle that had a cover designed to hide the luggage, and an out-of-state license plate on a vehicle in an interstate rest area provide any articulable basis upon which a reasonable person would have suspected that the Subaru was transporting illegal drugs," the court wrote. Because the search was the result of an unconstitutional detention, its results were suppressed. The full text of the decision is available in a 130k PDF file at the source link below.

Link: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/28/2883.asp
http://www.thenewspaper.com/rlc/docs/2009/sd-sniff.pdf