Posted on 04/21/2015 8:46:53 AM PDT by GIdget2004
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the Constitution forbids police from holding a suspect without probable cause, even for fewer than 10 extra minutes.
Writing on behalf of the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared that the constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure prevent police from extending an otherwise completed traffic stop to allow for a drug-sniffing dog to arrive.
“We hold that a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures,” she ruled.
The case, Rodriguez v. United States, was brought by a man who was pulled over for driving on the shoulder of a Nebraska highway. After the police pulled him over, checked his license and issued a warning for his erratic driving, the officer asked whether he could walk his drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle. The driver, Dennys Rodriguez, refused. However, the officer nonetheless detained him for “seven or eight minutes” until a backup officer arrived with a dog of his own.
After sniffing around the car, the dog detected drugs, and Rodriguez was indicted for possessing methamphetamine. In all, the stop lasted less than 30 minutes.
According to the Supreme Court, though, that search of Rodriguez’s car was illegal, and the evidence gathered in it should not be used at trial. While officers may use a dog to sniff around a car during the course of a routine traffic stop, they cannot extend the length of the stop in order to carry it out....
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy disagreed with the ruling, arguing that police can reasonably detain people to investigate other possible violations of the law.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
They will just raise your taxes to equip every cruiser with a drug-sniffing dog.
How can you pull over someone who is driving on the shoulder?
They can detain people upon a finding of probable cause. They are using the dog to obtain the probable cause, and the SCOTUS just said no.
But...but...we HAVE to search it to find out if we have probable cause.
Then a “new case” will wend it's way to the SCOTUS and those overworked bastards will take another five years contemplating their navels and playing with themselves (those that can) before daning to render a decision. What an absolutely shameful bunch.
While this case was in Nebraska one of the many “unusual” driving habits you can see every day in New Jersey is people passing a line of stopped traffic on the right hand berm. Sometimes a PO’ed tractor trailer driver pulls over just to stop them, but during the three long years I lived in that God forsaken State I never saw a cop intervene. One of their other tricks involves two or three cars needing to make left turns peeling out when the traffic light goes green. Whenever we see someone doing it now we say “They must be from Jersey”.
Yeah, that could take a number of different results that would be anything from the cop (assuming he has been briefed) saying “Crap, this driver knows his rights.” -up to and including - a full blown pursuit, lights, guns and beat down.
Without video evidence to support the driver in that case, I doubt it would go well.
Good decision.
Thomas and Alito probably would have wished to make some sort of reasonability test for how long, the problem with that is the STATE seems to take a BROAD view on what is reasonable for it and a NARROW view of responsibility for citizens.
My view and I think the founders is that as broad a view on the rights of the citizen and as narrow a view on the powers of the state SHOULD be the standard.
[[easily circumvented when the cop takes his time writing the traffic ticket]]
Or when the officer gets a cell phone call from his girlfriend and has to cuff the driver while he’s on the phone ‘for the safety of everyone involved’
In this case, I would think that they had no probable cause to have a dog sniff the car even if the dog was already present at the scene. Unless the driver gave some clear indication that led the officers to reasonably believe that he had illegal drugs in his car, any search, including sniffing by a police dog would be an unreasonable violation of the 4th amendment.
They called in the dogs on a hunch. They need a lot more than that.
I have heard it said that citizens have rights.
The government doesn’t have rights, it has responsibilities
With int the Constituion the state has powers and the citizen has rights.
Powers are granted from the citizens (the people) to the state.
oops
With in the Constitution the state has powers and the citizen has rights.
Powers are granted from the citizens (the people) to the state.
corrected for spelling and such.
This goes against what the court has ruled in recent years, typically granting wide latitude to police in searches.
The argument is primarily about the ability of the police to detain without objective probable cause. This was using the very subjective “reasonable suspicion” basis.
I suspect that “reasonable suspicion” has become too much like “profiling” in practice. Especially in situations like traffic stops.
They will just hire more cops.................
That is, unless the LEO decides to be your judge, jury, and executioner, all for feeling threatened, then you have no say in the matter at all.
Like I said, if a cop wants to nail you for something, they will find something.
As for the whole drug dog thing, all that will happen is that if the LEO suspects you possessing drugs during a traffic stop, they will just go back to their squad car, feign writing a ticket, and wait for the K-9 unit they called to show up, and let them do a “random” drug sweep, just because they “happened” to be in the area, and stopped to see what was going on.
I have several cops in the family, and I don't really talk to them because they inherited the sociopath gene from somewhere in the family tree.
Read the decision, it is pretty short. He wasn’t waiting for a dog as the headline suggests, he was waiting for a backup officer because there were two men in the car, and he feared a positive alert would be met with an attempt to escape.
He did establish what he, and Thomas/Alito thought was reasonable suspicion after stopping the guys, strong masking odor, excessive nervousness, and a suspect story by both, which is all that is required to detain someone for investigation of criminal activity.
It looks like the reasonable suspicion was tossed by an appeals judge and not argued, so I suppose this could be back to determine if the courts accept the facts supporting reasonable suspicion.
Hard to believe 6 members of the SCOTUS actually got it right.
The question of reasonable suspicion was not an issue before the Supreme Court. It was basically stipulated that there was no reasonable suspicion and the only issue before the court was whether, in the absence of a reasonable suspicion, the police may detain a driver based on some hunch long enough to bring a police dog to sniff for drugs.
Thomas and Alito had no jurisdiction to question the ruling of the lower court that there was no reasonable suspicion. That was not an issue to be decided. I think Justice Thomas' opinion is way off base. The only question was whether a continued delay after all the basics of a traffic stop has been completed violates the 4th amendment protection against unlawful seizure of a person. In this case I think Scalia was right and Thomas was wrong.
We need to have more protections from this current tyrannical government, not less.
I'm disappointed with Thomas. Alito is just terrible. These people are sold to us as "conservatives", but they are really police state authoritarians.
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