Ofc. Wheetley was a K9 handler who stopped Harris for having an expired license plate. During the stop, Harris refused consent to search his car so Wheetley walked his dog (Aldo) around the car. When Aldo alerted to the door handle, Wheetley searched the car and found meth precursors (it's worth noting that Aldo was trained to detect meth, but not meth precursors). Harris was arrested. After waiving Miranda, Harris admitted that he routinely cooks meth and that he can't go for more than a few days without using.
Later on, Wheetley stopped Harris again. Aldo alerted to the door handle again, but this time nothing was found.
Harris moved to suppress the results of the search, arguing that Aldo's alert was not probable cause. At trial, the prosecution presented evidence of Aldo's and Wheetley's ongoing training and testing (during which Aldo apparently did very well). The defense didn't attack the training, focusing instead on Aldo's field performance and especially on the two false alerts with Harris. Eventually, the Florida Supreme Court ruled in favor of Harris, finding that in order to establish probable cause the prosecution had to present a laundry list of items including training and certification records, explanations of those records, and especially records of field performance. The court was very concerned with numbers of false positives, and held that without every item on the list there was no way to establish probable cause. Since Wheetley didn't keep exhaustive field performance records, the court held that Aldo could therefore never establish probable cause.
The US Supreme Court reversed that. This decision discusses the nature of probable cause, specifically that "probable cause" describes a fair probability, based on the totality of the circumstances. It is not reducible to precise definition, it doesn't lend itself to checklists or mechanical tests, and it's not so rigid a standard as proof beyond reasonable doubt or preponderance of the evidence. In the context of a search, an officer has probable cause when the facts available to him would a warrant a person of reasonable caution in the belief that contraband or evidence of a crime is present. The court also mentioned that probable cause is not applied in hindsight: you can't decide whether or not there was probable cause based on whether or not something was found.
Relating all that to drug dogs, the Court held that the prosecution doesn't have to present a specific list of items in order to show PC. They should present what evidence they have, and the defense can attempt to refute that or present their own evidence, but there isn't a particular list of criteria (like field performance records) which have to be met. Also, the US Supreme Court criticized the Florida Supreme Court for it's fascination with field performance records. The Court noted that while they can certainly be evidence, they aren't really all that reliable compared to training records. The reason for that is that training and evaluation is conducted in a controlled environment, where the accuracy of the dog's alerts can actually be determined. Field records probably won't reflect the dog's false negatives. More pertinent here, false positives may not be false: the dog may have alerted to drugs that were hidden too well for the handler to find, or the dog may have alerted to the odor of drugs which were present but no longer are (such as all the meth that Harris admitted to doing). The court reasoned that neither of those circumstances would be an error on the dog's part, although it would be recorded as one. Hence the unreliability of field performance records.
In this case, the Court ruled that there was ample evidence from Aldo's training to show that his alert created a fair probability that contraband would be found (or, as the Justices put it, his sniff was up to snuff). The suppression of the evidence was reversed.
No comments:
Post a Comment