Texas: Dog scent lineup is called junk science.

HOUSTON - The San Jacinto County Sheriff's Department, north of Houston, used fraudulent "dog scent lineups" and testimony from a jailhouse snitch to send a man to prison for 2½ years for a murder he did not commit, Richard Winfrey claims in Federal Court.
Winfrey claims the Sheriff's Department "actively ignored all evidence to the contrary, including DNA tests performed on evidence collected at the crime scene that excluded [him] as an offender."
Winfrey claims Sheriff James Walters used a "junk science" dog scent lineup, devised by former Fort Bend County sheriff's Deputy Keith Pikett in the early 1990s.
The technique involves introducing a scent to a dog that has been collected from a crime scene, then presenting the dog with a series of containers with scents in them taken from suspects, Winfrey says.
"According to defendant Pikett, the dog will then communicate to its handler/observer if the scent that it 'got' the first time matches the scent of one of the containers," Winfrey says.
"Without a doubt, these lineups epitomize the worst of junk science," Winfrey adds. "Defendant Pikett developed the dog scent lineups without any training - he simply purchased bloodhound dogs and 'trained' them to indicate when two human scents matched.





Links:http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/06/02/ScentMatch.pdf
http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/06/02/27727.htm