Lucille
02-19-2013, 12:18 PM
From the comments:
"[I]f the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government’s own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers."
--Murray Rothbard
LEOs alert those dogs all the time. They did it to my darling husband at a border patrol checkpoint, whose truck was clean.
SCOTUS Approves Search Warrants Issued by Dogs
http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/19/scotus-approves-search-warrants-issued-b
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. While the Court's decision in Florida v. Harris leaves open the possibility that defense attorneys can contest the adequacy of a dog's training or testing and present evidence that the animal is prone to false alerts, this ruling will encourage judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine's capabilities, reinforcing the use of dogs to transform hunches into probable cause.
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:
[...]
The Supreme Court has not yet issued a ruling in Florida v. Jardines, the other drug dog case it heard last October. Jardines raises the question of whether police need a warrant to use a drug-sniffing dog at the doorstep of a home, and there is reason to believe the Court's answer will be less favorable to the government than the blanket endorsement of current practices it issued today.
"[I]f the ultimate power to interpret a constitution is given to the government’s own Supreme Court, then the inevitable tendency is for the Court to continue to place its imprimatur on ever-broader powers for its own government. Furthermore, the highly touted “checks and balances” and “separation of powers” in the American government are flimsy indeed, since in the final analysis all of these divisions are part of the same government and are governed by the same set of rulers."
--Murray Rothbard
LEOs alert those dogs all the time. They did it to my darling husband at a border patrol checkpoint, whose truck was clean.
SCOTUS Approves Search Warrants Issued by Dogs
http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/19/scotus-approves-search-warrants-issued-b
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. While the Court's decision in Florida v. Harris leaves open the possibility that defense attorneys can contest the adequacy of a dog's training or testing and present evidence that the animal is prone to false alerts, this ruling will encourage judges to accept self-interested proclamations about a canine's capabilities, reinforcing the use of dogs to transform hunches into probable cause.
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:
[...]
The Supreme Court has not yet issued a ruling in Florida v. Jardines, the other drug dog case it heard last October. Jardines raises the question of whether police need a warrant to use a drug-sniffing dog at the doorstep of a home, and there is reason to believe the Court's answer will be less favorable to the government than the blanket endorsement of current practices it issued today.