Law Commons^™

Pawing Their Way To The Supreme Court: The Evidence Required To Prove A Narcotic Detection Dog's Reliability, Monica Fazekas

Northern Illinois University Law Review

Historically, courts have given great deference to the anatomical scent detectors from which the canine’s heightened sense of smell derives. In 2005, the Supreme Court supported this position and held that a drug detection dog’s sniff did not constitute a search under the Fourth Amendment. The Court partially based its reasoning on the classification of the dog sniff as sui generis. With this holding, courts began admitting evidence of a drug detection dog’s alert to narcotics to constitute the requisite probable cause for an officer’s search. Virtually every circuit allows a canine alert to establish such probable cause by presenting …