Air Fresheners? You Betcha. Eating on the Go? Not So Much.

Jeff has written before about whether a traffic stop may be prolonged to allow time for a drug-sniffing dog to arrive on the scene and sniff about the car (which itself is not a Fourth Amendment search, see Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405, 409 (2005)).  As Jeff noted in his paper, it is unclear whether a brief delay to allow time for a canine unit to arrive is permissible absent reasonable suspicion of criminal activity; however, it is well-established that an extended delay to await a drug dog’s arrival must be supported by reasonable suspicion.  The North Carolina Court of Appeals in State v. Fisher, ___ N.C. App. ___ (March 20, 2012), recently considered whether a 20 to 25 minute detention of a defendant after he was stopped for a seatbelt violation was supported by the requisite suspicion.  The case struck me as worth blogging about both because of the court’s view that any detention of the defendant beyond the issuance of the citation must be supported by reasonable suspicion and the ordinariness of the factors the State relied upon as evidence of criminal activity. Some, but not all, of those factors were accepted by the court as appropriate factors to consider in a reasonable suspicion analysis (hence, the title of this post). The defendant in Fisher attracted the attention of a local police officer and drug investigator because he was not wearing his seatbelt and was driving “diligent[ly],” with “both hands on the wheel” in a “pack of traffic” [...]