Friday, February 22, 2013

Sullum Looks At Drug Dogs And The SCOTUS

I was glad I checked this link which should be of interest to those following the recent Supreme Court decision regarding the validity of drug dogs in establishing probable cause. Reason magazine's Jacob Sullum takes a close look at drug dogs and their effectiveness, and how the courts- the Supreme Court, specifically- view those cases.

Interesting read but I'm not sure I catch the full reasoning of why the court would be more skeptical of a drug dog's use in a search of a house as opposed to one of a car. Reliability of drug dogs doesn't seem to be considered in either case. I'm reading it as the court being more concerned about the location of where the drug dog alerted.


2 Comments:

At 2:31 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Henchman Of Justice" says,

and because dogs don't speak the english language, there really is "no way" to determine whether dogs make mistakes! Such a great ruse, ploy, guise, etc... that the police staters depend upon for absolute corruptive power (anything but another human being used as a tool that can't be reprimanded). - HOJ

 
At 2:59 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

It should be relatively easy for a genius like HOJ to identify false alerts, the times when a dog "alerted" but no contraband was found. The ratio of true alerts to false alerts is a good estimate of how reliable dog/human teams are. Now you might also want to know how often dog don't 'alert' but there is contraband. But in that circumstance no search was made so we won't know.

Even a dog with no nose would be right to alert 80% of the time in Humboldt. Did the supreme court address the circumstance of searches during a crime wave? Random searches are legal sometimes.

 

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