Last week, I wrote about the North Carolina Court of Appeals’ holding in State v. Smith, ___ N.C. App. ___, 729 S.E.2d 120 (2012), that a drug dog’s positive alert to a motor vehicle in which no drugs were found did not, by itself, provide probable cause to search the person of a recent passenger in the vehicle. A couple of folks have inquired post-Smith about whether the police can search an individual if a dog alerts to the person as opposed to a car in which the individual recently has been traveling. Smith does not address this issue, but other courts have and I thought it was sufficiently interesting to warrant a follow-up post. First, a brief re-cap of the status of dog sniffs under the Fourth Amendment: The United States Supreme Court held in Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U.S. 405 (2005), that a well-trained drug dog’s sniffing of the exterior of a car during a lawful traffic stop is not a search subject to the Fourth Amendment. Caballes relied in part on the high court’s determination in United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983), that a canine sniff of luggage in an airport by a well-trained dog was not a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment and its application in City of Indianapolis v. Edmond, 531 U.S. 32 (2000) of that principle from Place to exterior sniffs of cars by drug dogs. The Caballes Court, like the Court in Place and Edmond, reasoned that properly conducted [...]
Faculty Coordinators
