Supreme Court Declines to Rule on Limits for Drug-Sniffing Dogs

• Can the police bring a trained dog to stand outside a private home and sniff for drugs?

The Supreme Court in recent years has drawn constitutional rules for the use of newly popular law enforcement techniques. The police need a warrant before aiming a heat-detecting device at a private home in an effort to find out whether marijuana is growing inside under high-intensity lights. The police do not need a warrant before permitting a trained dog to sniff a car, or a piece of luggage at an airport, in order to detect drugs. Those precedents converged in a case from Texas that posed this question: Can the police bring a trained dog to stand outside a private home and sniff for drugs? The lower courts have disagreed, and the Supreme Court decided on Monday to let the confusion linger. The justices did not take the case. The court offered no explanation for declining to hear an appeal from a Houston man, David G. Smith, whose supply of methamphetamine in his garage was detected by a trained dog. After the dog was walked up Mr. Smith's driveway and signaled the presence of drugs behind the lower corner of the garage door, the Harris County Sheriff's Department obtained a search warrant and found the drugs and other criminal evidence. A state appeals court rejected Mr. Smith's appeal, upholding his conviction and his sentence to 37 years in prison. The Texas Court of Appeals issued its ruling in February 2004. The constitutional question in all such cases is whether the canine sniff is, under the circumstances, a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment; if so, it requires probable cause or a warrant. The court has never categorically held that a sniff is not a search, and although the justices on Monday made no law, the case itself offered a window into the growing use of trained dogs and some of the legal issues the practice raises. [more]