A rant in re: Illinois v. Caballes
- Dude is transferring 250,000 dollars of marijuana in the trunk of his car.
- He’s stopped for going six miles over the speed limit(!¹)
- When the stopping officer calls it in, another officer overhears it and offers to bring by his drug-sniffing dog and give it a spin. The dog alerts, the trunk is opened (without Caballes' consent), and the drugs are found.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
(It's the highlighted part that's at issue.)
Over the years, the jurisprudential notion has developed that the 4th Amendment means a person's "reasonable expectation of privacy" cannot be violated. So, for example, if I'm being ticketed for a traffic violation, the police officer can't just up and search my car or person because (he says) I look like the sort of person who might be transporting drugs. The Founders (pbut²) didn't trust people, even police, that far.
The lawyers for Mr. Caballes pointed out that we're supposed to trust dogs that far? Why should an innocent person be protected from a human and not from a dog? Dogs make mistakes, you know.
- Mr. Caballes was not innocent, now was he? And it's not reasonable to expect to be able to hide a crime.
- Dogs don't have opinions.³ And dogs don't make mistakes. We established that in United States v. Place. Furthermore:
Although respondent argues that the error rates, particularly the existence of false positives, call into question the premise that drug-detection dogs alert only to contraband, the record contains no evidence or findings that support his argument.
(That was in fact false. In his dissent, Justice Souter notes that Illinois' brief admits that "dogs in artificial testing situations return false positives anywhere from 12.5% to 60% of the time, depending on the length of the search", so "[t]he infallible dog [...] is a creature of legal fiction.")
That's what gripes me: the blasé willingness to believe something nonsensical just because (1) previous judges believed that nonsensical thing, and (2) "I don't see anything about that being nonsensical in these papers I have before me." (They could have said the record was incomplete and sent it back for further work by lower courts.)
The end result: an expansion of police powers, part of a gradual eroding of the rights of the people vs. the powers of the state. See also stop and frisk.
¹ This was on Interstate 80 near Chicago. I've driven there a number of times. On the Chicago "ring", driving only six miles above the speed limit makes you stand out. Drug runners should drive at the speed of the cars around them. "You had one job!"
² "(pbut)" is my somewhat jerkish way of mocking US society's reverence⁴ for the Infallibility of the Founders. It's a play on (pbuh), used by Muslims to show respect for Muhammad and other prophets.
³ My daughter's dog hates me, even more than she hates random strange men. If I followed the advice "be the kind of person your dog thinks you are", you'd next hear of me under a headline "Man, 64, goes on crazed rampage, kills wife, daughter, dog."
⁴ A reverence that the Founders did not have for themselves. The southeast wall of the Jefferson memorial in Washington quotes him:
"I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions, but laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors."
Unfortunately, among the mistakes the Founders (pbut) made was making the Constitution too hard to modify, which is downstream of their second biggest mistake, building a Constitution that assumed political parties wouldn't exist because they didn't like political parties (right up until the moment, almost immediately afterward, when they fissured into formal political parties).