Justices side with sniffing dog

U.S. court overturns Florida decision on traffic-stop drug arrest

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

— The Supreme Court on Tuesday sided with a drug-sniffing German shepherd named Aldo in ruling that police do not have to extensively document a dog’s expertise to justify relying on the animal to search someone’s vehicle.

In one of several decisions handed down Tuesday, the unanimous court overturned a decision by the Florida Supreme Court. That court had thrown out a 2006 search of a man’s truck after Aldo “alerted” to the smell of drugs, saying police must compile detailed evidence of the dog’s reliability before probable cause to search the vehicle is established.

Justice Elena Kagan said the Florida court had gone too far, and suggested that proper training and certification of the dog - rather than how it has performed in the field - might be enough for law enforcement’s purposes.

“The question - similar to every inquiry into probable cause - is whether all the facts surrounding a dog’s alert, viewed through the lens of common sense, would make a reasonably prudent person think that a search would reveal contraband or evidence of a crime,” Kagan wrote.

“A sniff is up to snuff when it meets that test. ... Aldo’s did.”

The case was one of two the court accepted regarding drug-sniffing dogs from Florida. It has not decided the other, which concerns whether police may bring a dog to someone’s home, and then use the dog’s “alert” to the presence of drugs as probable cause for getting a search warrant.

At oral arguments, that case - involving a chocolate Lab named Franky - caused considerably more debate among the justices.

Aldo’s case came from the Florida panhandle, where officer William Wheetley stopped Clayton Harris because of an expired license plate. Wheetley found Harris nervous and shaking, and the man refused Wheetley’s request to search his truck. Wheetley brought out Aldo, and the dog alerted to the smell of something on the driver’s side door-handle.

Wheetley used the alertas probable cause to search the vehicle and found the ingredients for making methamphetamine. Wheetley was convicted, but the Florida Supreme Court reversed the conviction.

The Florida high court, citing a growing body of evidence that dogs often make mistakes or are influenced by their handlers, said judges had to consider a long list of specific findings, including how the dogs perform in the field.

Kagan said that went too far and was at odds with previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions that prescribed “a more flexible, all-things-considered” approach. She noted that defense lawyers who had specific concerns about a dog’s qualification could still make such a case to a judge.

The case is Florida v. Harris, 11-817.

The Supreme Court also was unanimous in ruling Tuesday that an American soldier could still pursue custody of his daughter in American courts even though a lower court had allowed the mother to take the child to her native Scotland.

An appeals court rendered Sgt. 1st Class Jeffrey Lee Chafin’s lawsuit moot, because international child custody suits must be conducted in the child’s “country of habitual residence.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit was wrong to rule that Chafin’s only remedy was in Scottish courts. He had a right to appeal the lower court’s determination of where the child should live, he said.

Chafin and Scottish-born Lynne Chafin were married in her country in 2006, and their daughter was born thenext year. They lived together in Germany until he was deployed to Afghanistan, and mother and daughter moved to Scotland.

Jeffrey Chafin was transferred to Alabama in 2009, and, even though the marriage was in trouble, the family reunited there. They agreed to divorce in 2010, Lynne Chafin was deported after her visa expired, and then she filed her petition to have Eris join her in Scotland.

A federal judge in Alabama agreed with Lynne Chafin and declined to grant a stay of the order. Mother and child departed that day. When Jeffrey Chafin appealed, the 11th Circuit dismissed his petition. It said that under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, to which the United States is one of more than 80 signatories, there was nothing left for U.S. courts to decide.

Roberts said Jeffrey Chafin may not prevail in American courts, and even if he does, it does not guarantee the return of Eris, now 6. But he said those uncertainties did not render the case moot.

The case is Chafin v. Chafin, No. 11-1347.

Also Tuesday, the Supreme Court limited the power of police to detain people who are not at home when their residence is to be searched.

By a 6-3 vote Tuesday, the justices sided with a Long Island, N.Y., man who was picked up about three-quarters of a mile away from his apartment as police searched it for a gun.

Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court’s majority that the authority of police to detain people found at home during a search authorized by a warrant is limited to the immediate vicinity of the premises. He said concern for officer safety diminishes the farther away from the home the detention occurs.

In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer said he would have upheld lower court rulings in favor of the police “in light of the risks of flight, of evidence destruction, and of human injury present in this and similar cases.” Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas joined Breyer’s dissent.

The Fourth Amendment usually requires police to strongly suspect an individual has committed a crime before he can be detained. But the court in 1981 ruled in Michigan v. Summers that police could detain people without suspicion during a search to keep them from doing harm to officers, keep them from fleeing and allowing them to, for example, open a door instead of having the police bash it in.

In this case, Chunon Bailey, unaware of the impending search, left his basement apartment in Wyandanch, N.Y., shortly before police began the search. Officers followed in an unmarked car and stopped the Lexus a few minutes later. Bailey and his friend were handcuffed and taken back to the apartment, where, by then, police had found a gun and drugs.

Bailey tried and failed to get courts to throw out anything he said to police when he was stopped and also a key to the apartment police found when they patted him down. He was found guilty of cocaine possession and other crimes and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Kennedy said none of the concerns presented in the court’s 1981 case justified Bailey’s detention.

The case is Bailey v. United States, 11-770.

Information for this story was contributed by Robert Barnes of The Washington Post; by Mark Sherman of The Associated Press; and by Greg Stohr of Bloomberg News.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 02/20/2013