Small Victories: "Supreme Court Says Police Violated 4th Amendment When Use of Drug-Sniffing Dog Prolonged Routine Traffic Stop."

Via Reason.com: "In a 6-3 decision issued today in the case of Rodriguez v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court held that Nebraska police violated the Fourth Amendment by extending an otherwise lawful traffic stop in order to let a drug-sniffing dog investigate the outside of the vehicle. According to the majority opinion of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, “a police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures.” While “an officer...may conduct certain unrelated checks during an otherwise lawful traffic stop,” Ginsburg held, “a dog sniff, unlike the routine measures just mentioned, is not an ordinary incident of a traffic stop.”"

Why the New Limits on Drug-Sniffing Dogs Matter - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Today, as Damon Root noted this morning, the Supreme Court ruled that in the absence of reasonable suspicion, police officers who extend a traffic stop for the purpose of walking a drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle are violating the Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable seizures. As I noted last fall, this case is more important than it might seem because of the leeway the Court already has given cops and their dogs...

In the 1983 case U.S. v. Place, the Court said a canine olfactory inspection does not count as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, meaning police do not need probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion, to conduct one. That decision set the stage for Illinois v. Caballes, the 2005 case in which the Court said walking a dog around a car during a routine traffic stop does not violate the driver's Fourth Amendment rights, provided the encounter is not "unreasonably prolonged" for that purpose. And last year, in Florida v. Harris, the Court confirmed what judges generaly had assumed, ruling unanimously that a police dog's alert, which may be erroneous, imagined, invented, or deliberately triggered, by itself is enough to justify a search unless the defendant can show the dog is unreliable—a tall order when the evidence on that point is controlled by the police, who have little incentive to collect it."