SCOTUS Approves Search Warrants Issued by Dogs

Reason ^ | February 19, 2013 | Jacob Sullum

[Altariel]

Today the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that "a court can presume" an alert by a drug-sniffing dog provides probable cause for a search "if a bona fide organization has certified a dog after testing his reliability in a controlled setting" or "if the dog has recently and successfully completed a training program that evaluated his proficiency in locating drugs." The justices overturned a 2011 decision in which the Florida Supreme Court said police must do more than assert that a dog has been properly trained. They deemed that court's evidentiary requirements too "rigid" for the "totality of the circumstances" test used to determine when a search is constitutional. In particular, the Court said it was not appropriate to demand evidence of a dog's performance in the field, as opposed to its performance on tests by police.

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Writing for the Court, Justice Elena Kagan accepts several myths that allow drug dogs to function as "search warrants on leashes" even though their error rates are far higher than commonly believed:

[Tau Food]

Maybe the courts should decide that the search is illegal only in those cases where the dog refuses to clearly testify as to how he determined what he determined.