Quote:
Originally Posted by Ansky
After I get my back, three plain clothed officers came up to me as I was walking out and flashed a badge and said (in classic quebecois accent) "excuse me guy, we noticed dat the dog took an interest in your bag, did you see dis?" and i say "uhhh no" or some ****. They ask if I have any drugs on me, and I of course do not. The guy says "well sorry, but the dog is never really wrong so we will have to see about that."
Justice Souter's dissent in Illinois v. Caballes (not to mention your story) should put to rest the myth that drug dogs are infallible (or even generally accurate):
"The infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction. Although the Supreme Court of Illinois did not get into the sniffing averages of drug dogs, their supposed infallibility is belied by judicial opinions describing well-trained animals sniffing and alerting with less than perfect accuracy, whether owing to errors by their handlers, the limitations of the dogs themselves, or even the pervasive contamination of currency by cocaine."
I would go much further than Souter does here, and include "deliberate mishandling" as a huge factor that leads to drug-dog false positives. By this I mean the cop does something intentionally, like a special command or hand motion, to make the dog react as if there was a "hit." If police trainers can train dogs to paw and bark at objects when they actually detect narcotics, it would be trivially easy to make the dog do the same when a police officer makes a subtle hand motion, or uses a "magic word" in conversation. Of course police have enormous incentives to search anything they can, on the off chance they find contraband. After all, departments receive funding (and individual cops receive promotions) based on arrests, convictions, amounts of contraband seized, etc. But, that pesky exclusionary rule would get those convictions overturned if not for the dog giving a justification, false or otherwise, to search.
Basically, drug dogs are an end-run around the 4th Amendment, which, as I said earlier, has effectively been repealed judicially.