The court of appeals issued a batch of opinions yesterday. Among them is State v. Washburn, a drug dog case. An extremely compressed summary of Washburn is that an informant told the police that the defendant was a drug dealer and kept drugs at his house and at a storage unit. Based on the tip, the police took a drug dog to the storage facility, which was a climate-controlled building with storage units opening off an indoor hallway, and got the consent of the facility's owner to walk the dog through the hallway. The dog alterted at the defendant's unit, which led the police to get a search warrant for it, and things went downhill for the defendant pretty quickly after that. The defendant first argued that "the dog sniff of the hallway outside of his locked storage unit constitute[d] an illegal warrantless search because he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the storage facility, including the hallway area." In other words, he argued that the police couldn't come into the hallway at all. The court rejected that argument, noting that (1) the hallway wasn't very private, since all the facility's tenants had access to it, and (2) in any event, the facility's owner consented. The defendant's second argument was that even if the police were lawfully in the hallway, the dog sniff itself was a search, supported neither by a search warrant nor an exception to the warrant requirement. The opinion says that the defendant cited United States v. [...]
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