North Carolina’s appellate courts have recently issued two important opinions on the use of drug dogs, and the United States Supreme Court has granted certiorari in another drug dog case. This post summarizes these recent developments.
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Florida v. Jardines: Bringing a Drug Dog to the Front Porch Is a Search
Today, most Supreme Court watchers are focused on the oral argument in the same-sex marriage cases. But the Court also released an important opinion in Florida v. Jardines, ruling that an officer conducts a Fourth Amendment search when he brings a drug dog onto the porch of a house to sniff the front door. Jardines … Read more
Dog Sniffs of People and the Fourth Amendment
Last week, I wrote about the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ holding in State v. Smith, ___ N.C. App. ___, 729 S.E.2d 120 (2012), that a drug dog’s positive alert to a motor vehicle in which no drugs were found did not, by itself, provide probable cause to search the person of a recent passenger … Read more
The Reliability of Drug-Sniffing Dogs
This recent post by Professor Orin Kerr reports on an emerging split of authority on what the state needs to show about the training and experience of a drug-sniffing dog before a dog’s alert will provide probable cause – to search a car, for example, or to support the issuance of a search warrant for … Read more
Drug Dogs
The court of appeals issued a batch of opinions yesterday. Among them is State v. Washburn, a drug dog case. An extremely compressed summary of Washburn is that an informant told the police that the defendant was a drug dealer and kept drugs at his house and at a storage unit. Based on the tip, … Read more