Drug dogs only provide probable cause for drug searches. They arent suppoaed to extend to other crimes. Just as if the dog alerts on private property and a warrant is then needed, it only provides probable cause for a drug search (or related offense).
On another note, in many states the dogs can't be trained on marijuana as it has legal purposes (medicinal or recreational). If coming from a state where it is legal, it still shouldn't provide probable cause as the sniffable residue could be from previous legal use.
So in my view, the drug dog liability is low (biggest threat being planted evidence, but that could happen anyways), and being reined in further. Yes, the made-up probable cause is more likely. That's why I was wondering.
The entire existence of a class of contraband that cops can claim to be searching for at any time is a massive loophole in the fourth amendment, and as such, the drug prohibition wave of the mid-20th century was instrumental in turning the US (and for that matter a majority of developed countries) into police states
That's the thing - it's not considered a search. That's how they get away with it. The sniffing has to happen in public (or with a warrant) and is considered in plain smell (same as an officer smelling alcohol on your breath in a car). Then the dog provides probable cause for the real search.
Well, really everything has become heavily criminalized in the 20th century. Especially as things that aren't outright outlawed are regulated to the extreme. Drugs, alcohol, guns, knives, etc. Some things have gotten more open, but virtually everything has gotten more complicated and easy to get tripped up on technicalities.
The officer "smelling alcohol on your breath" is infamously applied to any situation where the officer lacks probable cause. It cannot be verified in a criminal case or in litigation, the officer is simply presumed to be telling the truth, and if proven to be lying is never, ever imprisoned for perjury.
It may as well be "The officer saw you drinking in a vision"
This is only partially true (on several of the statements).
The plain smell test has this problem in general. So does any witness testimony. In the case of driving, they will issue sobriety tests and a blood test. But part of these searches is different because of the way driving is treated as a privilege and the conditions you agree too in requesting a license. These subsequent tests will verify the officer's statements. The admissibility of evidence from searches based on this sort of "mistake" is up to the court to determine if it was in good faith.
As for the lying... there is a difference between lying and being mistaken. Very few people in general are prosecuted for perjury because it requires proving that they willfully provided false testimony. This is very evident in the way protection from abuse orders are misused in many divorces and the requestor is almost never charged. However, police are (in theory) held to a higher standard with the use of Giglio/Brady lists. These list only need to show that the officer is repeatedly unreliable, not actually lying. In practice, these might not be very effective because it's up to prosecutors to maintain these lists. They only have incentive to add officers if they lose too many cases for the prosecution.
In an environment where police officers are effectively immune from any consequences of any actions, which appears to be almost true - barring widespread media coverage and consistent pressure from essentially a majority of US adults for multiple months at a time - the actual nature of the pretense used to take the officer's word for things is pretty immaterial
The theory-practice gap is so wide as to make the theoretical maxima essentially fantasy with body cameras that are proprietary and owned and operated by the same police departments they are supposed to be an accountability mechanism for
In theory you could, but that requires something like a small scale mass spectrometer to feed recordings into the camera log. So in practice, not realistic... yet.
It is still a federal crime to use marijuana, even in states where it is legal under state law. Also, if you are in a car, they just have to suspect you were driving while under the influence of marijuana and it becomes probable cause again. But it is unlikely that residue alone constitutes sufficient evidence of a crime, because they would never bother to investigate someone smoking a joint so severely anyway.
I believe you are also wrong about the limited scope of a search. If additional crimes are uncovered during a legitimate search, they absolutely can charge you with it and use the evidence they found. Think about what you're saying. If they find pools of blood in your trunk while looking for drugs, they will definitely admit that as evidence against you and cause to search all your property.
Apparently (and not too surprisingly) it’s much more complicated than that. In Washington, police are explicitly forbidden from enforcing immigration laws (“Keep Washington Working” act) and nationally, police could perhaps arrest you for weed but the feds are apparently not allowed to spend any money prosecuting you if you didn’t break state law, according to the Rohrerbacher-Farr amendment https://scholarship.law.uc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
Immigration enforcement is the most prominent today probably.
Local police can arrest anyone for illegally crossing US border and can arrest someone for being undocumented(where not banned by state law), they are just not obligated to by federal law or US constitution.
I agree with you in general but police can do a lot of things on suspicion of a crime. They may have to let you go eventually, but don't overestimate your position. You could be tied up for months straightening out issues with false accusations.
Real question: Who counts as "the feds"? I assume at least the FBI and Secret Service. Are there others? Maybe some Postal or Immigration police? How about Department of Homeland Security?
Recreational - no, but you also won't get arrested by the Feds. TSA will report it to law enforcement. If it's legal in that state, nothing will happen orher than forfeiture if you plan to fly. Basically the same deal as if you left a knife in your bag.
> Only the feds enforce federal crimes, so it's not relevant to most traffic stops.
You're unlikely to be arrested by any federal LEO, as there are not many of them. Your local LEO do the arrest and then transfer to the relevant agency.
Law enforcement can, and do, cooperate to arrest individuals.
Imagine if a suspect could get away from being arrested just by crossing into another state.
Yes and no. Depends on what you consider an arrest. Colloquially, yes, any law enforcement can arrest you for any level of offense. Technically, the arrest is made by the officer with jurisdiction that you end up being transferred into their custody and putting their name on the paperwork. The big bottleneck here is that the Feds decline to have many people held because they don't have enough people to take the transfer. They perfer to let the state level law do their work for them (as on many topics they're basically the same). In the case we're talking about, the Feds generally don't care about marijuana in a traffic stop since their policy is to basically ignore it in states where it's legal.
I said an example. If you're found with a dead body in your trunk for example, that will not be thrown out on a technicality, especially if it was found during an otherwise legal search. I don't have the case law memorized but I've heard lawyers discuss it before. If you do some research you will find exceptions to 4th amendment protections, such as the ones in this article: https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-rights/the-fourth-...
I meant actual case law examples. If it's a body in plain view during the other search, then that falls under the plain view exception. If it's somehow concealed in a way that they can't tell what it is, then they shouldn't be able to use it. Of course judges would use every avenue possible to side with the police on an issue of murder (assuming it was murder and not just a corpse from some other reason).
You'd just be an idiot to think that your dead body in the trunk would be excluded as evidence during any search, much less a lawful search. Searches of cars are special as well and do not require a warrant, only probable cause like "I smelled something" or "The suspect was acting erratic/intoxicated" which is your word vs. theirs. If you find a case where a murderer was uncovered during a lawful search and that evidence was thrown out due to it being off topic, please let me know.
"In that one a lawful search turned up unexpected items, and those items were permitted."
Yes, that's the plain view exception I mentioned earlier.
"Even an error in a warrant might not save you."
Yeah, depends on the error and the good faith excpetion.
"Searches of cars are special as well and do not require a warrant,"
Yes, I mentioned that in other comments. But that probable cause is supposed to follow the same standards. It's just expedited by cutting out the judge.
That example would be hard to find because anything they find could be potentially covered under the independent source avenue. But that has to come from a separate warrant. Since murders don't have a statute of limitations, that's open ended and would almost always result in a secondary search even if the first search evidence was thrown out.
>Yes, that's the plain view exception I mentioned earlier.
I think there is more than one plain view exception. Things in plain view from outside your protected space are definitely fair game but that is not what that case describes. Things were found in plain view while conducting a search for another reason. So, presumably, if your garage was being searched for a stolen car, that would not cover discoveries made while digging through boxes in there. But if they were digging through boxes for stolen property and found evidence of another crime, they could use it. The contents of opaque boxes are not in "plain view" but can be uncovered in an unrelated search.
Can a discovery from an illegal search give probable cause for another search? I think it can.
There are many ways the 4th amendment can fall apart in practice. All I was saying in the first comment (that I remember) is that evidence of additional crimes is admissible if it was found during a legal search for some other purpose. Needless to say, there are also many situations where an officer can lie about probable cause and get away with it. Juries and judges care more about stopping crime than the privacy rights of criminals. Only the most blatant violations of the 4th amendment ever work against the state from what I've seen. And if you're innocent, you can complain. But the complaints rarely go anywhere either.
It’s a really good algorithm imo designed to reduce the flame war we see everywhere else but here online. As we stumble in hacker news half beat and fully traumatized from the rest of the internet it’s nice to know I can’t even start a flame war here if I wanted to. Contro-factor maybe.
What’s more interesting is how easy hacker news can detect a boiled egg.
Only the most refined version of a red head can make it here on hacker news. One must veil their agitations in deep plausible deniability to get past the gate. Embrace the vanilla and refine your penmanship.
People post similar comments with opposite views as mine. So there must be something else going on. Maybe if a few people downvote you, HN downvotes you everywhere else. Or else, the site prefers a few viewpoints and has a way to detect negative responses to those views. Either way, it is very offputting. I don't appreciate someone putting their thumb on the scales. I can't even downvote at this point due to not enough points, and at the rate it's going I might be able to do it like next year.
Then there's the "You're posting too fast" thing. I think fast and people respond with predictable stuff to my comments. I can only respond to like 2 of them at once or I won't be able to comment on anything else for hours.
I don't think there's anything wrong with spirited discussions. If you don't want to participate, then don't. Simple argument does not make it a flame war.
> Either way, it is very off-putting. I don't appreciate someone putting their thumb on the scales.
The problem is things are very selectively enforced, so it ends up not feeling fair or consistent. The intentions are great, the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
It’s possible someone deployed ai to follow your digital shadow around but this is purely hypothetical. Do you have similar experiences on other platforms? I am only chiming in because at one point of my experience here I felt the same as you do. Only later realizing my “tone” was the culprit.
On another note, in many states the dogs can't be trained on marijuana as it has legal purposes (medicinal or recreational). If coming from a state where it is legal, it still shouldn't provide probable cause as the sniffable residue could be from previous legal use.
So in my view, the drug dog liability is low (biggest threat being planted evidence, but that could happen anyways), and being reined in further. Yes, the made-up probable cause is more likely. That's why I was wondering.