Alan Diaz/Associated Press
Aldo, a German shepherd, and Franky, a chocolate Labrador retriever, are
exceptions. The Supreme Court plans to hear their cases on Wednesday.
The basic question in both cases, said Orin S. Kerr,
a leading expert on the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable
search, is this: “What do you think of a dog’s nose?”
It is surely a marvel. But is it also, as the Supreme Court has suggested in previous cases, essentially infallible?
The great thing about dogs trained to sniff out drugs and other
contraband, the court has said, is that they cannot invade human privacy
because their noses reveal, as Justice John Paul Stevens put it in 2005, “no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess.”
As the prosecutors in Franky’s case wrote, “anything else that the dog smells remains private.”
But there is reason to doubt that dogs are, as a brief for two groups of criminal defense lawyers put it, “binary contraband detectors.”
Justice David H. Souter, in a dissent from the 2005 decision,
cited a study showing “that dogs in artificial testing situations
return false positives anywhere from 12.5 to 60 percent of the time.”
“The infallible dog,” he wrote, “is a creature of legal fiction.”
2 comments:
beautiful dog
is that coke on his snout?
From transcripts it looks like Howard did a great job. DOM's favorite justice, Scalia, making David proud.
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