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Court sniffs at dog-search concerns.

Article Excerpt
In Illinois v. Caballes, the Supreme Court held that using a drug-sniffing dog to inspect a car stopped for a traffic violation did not run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. (1) Chief Justice William Rehnquist did not participate but surely agreed with the 6-2 majority opinion by Justice John Paul Stevens.

In the incident that led to the ruling, an Illinois state trooper stopped Roy Caballes for speeding. Another trooper heard about the stop on the police radio and headed for the scene with a drug-detecting dog, even though the first trooper had not indicated any suspicion of drugs or asked for assistance. While the first trooper was writing the ticket, the second walked the dog around the car. The dog alerted the officers to the car's trunk. They opened it and found marijuana. The entire incident lasted less than 10 minutes.

The Illinois Supreme Court struck down the search, finding that there were no "specific and articulable facts" to suggest drug activity, so using the dog "unjustifiably enlarg[ed] the scope of a routine traffic stop into a drug investigation." (2)

The U.S. Supreme Court reversed, holding that the initial seizure of the car for speeding was justified by probable cause. The Court recognized that "a seizure that is lawful at its inception can violate the Fourth Amendment if its manner of execution unreasonably infringes interests protected by the Constitution." (3) Here, however, the Illinois courts had concluded that the duration of the traffic stop was "entirely justified by the traffic offense and the ordinary inquiries incident to such a stop." (4)

Accordingly, the only remaining question for the Court was whether the dog sniff itself was a separate search requiring additional justification to be valid under the Fourth Amendment. The Court said it was not, because the dog sniff did "not implicate legitimate privacy interests." (5) The Court...