Supreme Court to Decide if Cops Can Raid Homes Based on Drug-Sniffing Dog

By David Kravets, Wired.com

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide for the first time whether judges may issue search warrants for private residences when a drug-sniffing dog outside the home reacts as if it smells drugs inside.

The case, involving a suspected Florida drug dealer, tests the limits of government intrusion into the home. The justices and lower courts have routinely sanctioned search warrants based on drug-detecting dogs responding to packages like airport luggage or vehicles stopped during routine traffic stops.

But a private residence is another story. The case pending before the court is made all the more important because the Obama administration already claims there is no privacy in one’s public movements outside a private dwelling.

The issue is being watched closely by at least 18 states that warned the Supreme Court that the Florida case “jeopardizes a widely used method of detecting illegal drugs” (.pdf).

The case tests a decade-old Supreme Court precedent in which the justices have ruled that thermal-imaging devices used outside a house to detect marijuana-growing operations inside amounted to a search and therefore required a warrant. In that case, the high court ruled in 2001 that “rapidly advancing technology” threatens the core of the Fourth Amendment “right of a man to retreat into his own home and there be free from unreasonable governmental intrusion.”

To read more, visit:  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/scotus-dog-sniffing-case/

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