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Court broadens search powers

By Times wire
Published January 25, 2005

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court gave police broader search powers Monday, saying the Constitution doesn't protect motorists' vehicles from the "nosy" inquiries of drug-sniffing dogs during routine traffic stops.

In a 6-2 ruling, the justices sided with Illinois state troopers who used a narcotics-detection dog to sniff around Roy Caballes' trunk after stopping him for speeding. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, sick with thyroid cancer, didn't take part in the case.

Caballes was transporting $250,000 in marijuana, which was found after the dog alerted officers.

Caballes said the use of the dog violated his right to privacy, since the officers had no evidence to suggest he was a drug offender before the dog arrived on the scene. It was a traffic stop, he said, and to expand the scope of the stop, the officers needed probable cause. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed with him and threw out his conviction.

But the justices said Monday that Caballes had no constitutional right to privacy concerning illegal drugs, and because the police dog was trained only to search for contraband narcotics - as opposed to money or any other lawful possession - the officers' action didn't violate constitutional search-and-seizure protections.

"We have held that any interest in possessing contraband cannot be deemed "legitimate,"' Justice John Paul Stevens wrote. "Accordingly, the use of a well-trained narcotics-detection dog ... during a lawful traffic stop, generally does not implicate legitimate privacy interests."

The ruling gives police, who can't search cars themselves without probable cause, an easier way to apprehend drug offenders as a result of routine traffic stops. By simply using dogs, instead of their own powers of observation, they can avoid constitutional restrictions.

That's what's wrong with the decision, said John Wesley Hall, an Arkansas defense lawyer who helped write a brief for the National Association of Criminal Defense lawyers in support of Caballes.

"All this does is exacerbate the problem of profile stops," Hall said, adding that police often target people who "look like" drug dealers for traffic stops, hoping to arrest them for something bigger. "Now they just need to stop someone who fits their profile and bring the dog."

Hall's concerns were echoed in the opinions of the dissenting justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter. Ginsburg said that a drug-sniffing dog was an "intimidating animal" and that injecting that animal into routine traffic stops fundamentally changed the encounter.

Souter doubted the court's faith in the idea of a dog that will sniff only for drugs and not other, lawful possessions. "The infallible dog ... is a creature of legal fiction," Souter wrote.

In another case Monday, the high court declined to consider whether states may offer license plates with antiabortion messages, leaving lower courts divided over the programs.

Without comment, justices let stand a ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Richmond, Va., that said South Carolina's "Choose Life" license plates violate the First Amendment because abortion rights supporters weren't given a similar forum to express their beliefs.

The move means that South Carolina will either have to eliminate the plates or offer plates with abortion rights views.

The 4th Circuit ruling is at odds, however, with an earlier decision by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which allowed the plates because it said abortion rights advocates didn't have standing to bring a lawsuit.

Florida is among the states offering "Choose Life" plates.

[Last modified January 25, 2005, 01:21:08]