Dog's bad nose prompts judge to toss drug case

Herald Tribune ^

[DieHard the Hunter]

> Can’t wait to read your well thought out reply.
> I’m sure it begins with something like “well, if you have nothing to hide...”...right?

Well... no. On the off-chance that “JBT” means ‘Jack-Booted Thug’ then there is a problem with your analogy.

It would work if there were equivalency between the dog and the JBT. But there isn’t.

The dog has olefactory senses that are many orders of magnitude greater than the JBT. And it is trained to use these senses to detect drugs.

The JBT isn’t, and never can be.

It is reasonable to believe that the dog detects something when it reacts to a scent it interprets to be drugs. In this scenario it is possible that the dog’s senses were *too* well tuned, perhaps in the past picking up on trace scents on vehicles which used to contain drugs, but no longer did.

A JBT, however, would never have reasonable cause to search a car for drugs because it would never be reasonable to believe that he detected the scent of drugs.

Thus your analogy fails the “equivalence” test.