The following entry is edited from an Education Law Association (ELA) blog entry posted on October 31, 2012 and written by Mark Walsh. It is not my original work and is posted for information only.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases related to the use of drug-sniffing dogs. While neither case deals specifically with the use of dogs on school grounds, both have potential implications for the use of drug-sniffing dogs in public schools.
The first case is Florida v. Jardines (No. 11-564) where the question revolves around whether a police dog’s sniff at the front door of a home ever constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Supreme Court has so far held in various contexts that drug-dog sniffs are not a search for Fourth Amendment purposes. The case was filed on behalf of Joelis Jardines, whose home was approached in 2006 by a drug-sniffing dog and handler with the Miami-Dade County, Fla., police department. The dog was trained to detect the odor of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and other drugs.
The dog alerted at the front door of the house, which the police used as the basis to obtain a warrant to search the house. They found numerous marijuana plants and growing equipment inside. Jardines was arrested. The Florida Supreme Court held that the use of a drug detection dog at the door of the home was a search under the Fourth Amendment and had to itself be justified by probable cause.
The second case is Florida v. Harris (No. 11-817) and involves a 2006 traffic stop of Clayton Harris’s truck outside of Tallahassee, Fla. A sheriff’s department officer had his drug-detection dog sniff around the exterior of the truck. The dog alerted for the odor of drugs at the door’s handle, and based on that, and the nervousness of Harris, the officer felt he had probable cause to search the cab of the truck, which turned up ingredients to make methamphetamines.
The Florida Supreme Court ruled in Harris’s favor, holding that the search evidence should have been suppressed. The court said probable cause for searches after a dog alerts only may be established after the state has proven the dog’s reliability by presenting training and certification records, including field performance records and evidence about the experience and training of the officer handling the dog.
Florida appealed both rulings to the Supreme Court.
While neither case applies to schools, the legal issues involved could apply to school use of such dogs. The Public defenders in both cases raised concerns about the scope of such dog sniffs, including in the schools. One public defender wrote in his brief, “police officers would be free to randomly take a narcotics detection dog up to the front door of selected houses in a suburban neighborhood, or take a narcotics detection dog up to the front door of every apartment in an inner city apartment complex selected by the police, or walk a narcotics dog up and down the halls of a school to sniff the students passing by.”
In one brief, the public defender cited several school cases, including one in Texas in which a dog falsely alerted to a student’s perfume because it gave off an odor the dog thought was a drug, and another in Indiana in which a dog alerted to a 13-year-old female student, which led school officials to require the student to disrobe. No illegal drugs were found, and it turned out the student had been playing that morning with one of her own dogs, which was in heat.
That case was back in 1980, and it is less common now for students themselves to be subject to sniffs by drug-detection dogs. It is more common for school authorities to invite the police and detection dogs into the schools to sniff lockers or parking lots. Another tactic is requiring students to leave their backpacks to be sniffed by detection dogs.
In 2010, a Texas state appellate court upheld the delinquency finding for a student whose backpack contained marijuana. The Austin, Texas, police brought a detection dog into a high school to conduct a classroom-by-classroom sniff of student’s belongings. The detection dog alerted to one student’s backpack, and a search turned up marijuana.
The Texas court held that the dog sniff of the student’s backpack “implicated a relatively minor privacy interest” and that “the seizure effectively addressed the problem of student drug use and served the important governmental interest in protecting the students’ safety and health.”
Decisions in the cases are expected by next June.
