Homeless in Arizona

So according to this article if the cops want to search your car against your will with a drug dog, they have 8 minutes to do it after they finish writing the traffic ticket.

Another reason you should always take the 5th and refuse to answer any police questions.

Because if you willfully talk to the cops, the courts could extend that 8 minute time.

Source

SCOTUS Rules Unreasonably Prolonged K-9 Searches Consitute “Illegal Detention”

According to a 2005 decision by the Supreme Court, a drug-sniffing dog “can be used at any traffic stop, whether or not there is suspicion of a controlled substance being transported.”

By Katie Rucke @katierucke | February 4, 2014

Eight minutes.

That’s how much time police officers in the United States have been granted under the U.S. Constitution to extend a routine traffic stop so that a local K-9 unit can come with a drug-sniffing dog and search a vehicle, without any reasonable suspicion there are any drugs inside.

In other words, an officer can legally require a driver pulled over for speeding or driving with a broken taillight to wait eight minutes for a drug-sniffing dog to show up, even without any evidence or suspicion that the driver is under the influence of or in the possession of drugs.

Though it may sound like a violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure to use a drug-sniffing dog on a car that an officer has no reasonable suspicion contains drugs, Orin Kerr, the Fred C. Stevenson Research Professor at the George Washington University Law School, says these slightly delayed stops are actually legal.

Why is that? According to a 2005 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, the use of a trained drug-sniffing dog “can be used at any traffic stop, whether or not there is suspicion of a controlled substance being transported.” In other words, anyone pulled over for any reason can be subjected to a drug-dog search, so long as the traffic stop is not extended for a long time.

“A dog sniff conducted during a concededly lawful traffic stop that reveals no information other than the location of a substance that no individual has any right to possess does not violate the 4th Amendment,” the court ruled.

Though many Americans have taken to lower courts to protest the use of drug-sniffing dogs, especially in those instances when an officer has no reasonable suspicion that drugs are in the car, the courts have largely sided with the dogs.

Civil liberties groups say this is concerning because the court’s rulings presume that drug-sniffing dogs are so well trained that false positives are rare, if nonexistent. Even Justice David Souter pointed to a study from the University of Auburn, showing that drug dogs have a false positive rate that ranges between 12.5 to 60 percent of the time, depending on the length of the search.

Civil liberties implication

While Kerr says it may sound trivial to have an exact amount of time an officer can bring dogs to search a car, he says the amount of time an officer is allowed to extend a traffic stop has big implications for the civil rights of all Americans.

For example, Kerr says that if the court were to rule that a traffic stop cannot last one second longer than it takes to write a ticket — which is about 10 to 15 minutes — dogs would likely only be used when they were already on the scene or if there was reasonable suspicion to justify their use.

“On the other hand, if the courts say that the police can extend the stop for a long time,” Kerr says, “then the police will be free to bring out the dogs at routine traffic stops whenever they like.”

As Kerr noted, many courts side with the officers if the police can prove that they didn’t keep a driver any longer than it took to write a ticket or a warning. But the law professor says Americans need to be aware that time is not the only way to determine whether a stop was too long.

Known as “unreasonable delay” techniques, an officer may try to ask a driver questions unrelated to the traffic infraction to buy time for a K-9 unit to arrive.

Though an officer “may conduct an investigation reasonably related to the scope of the circumstances that justified the traffic stop” — which includes acquiring a driver’s license, insurance and registration, and a quick computer check to determine if there are outstanding warrants or other violations out for the car or driver — an officer is legally prohibited from asking questions unrelated to the traffic citation.

In Maxwell v. State, for example, a Florida deputy delayed a traffic stop by asking more than 50 questions such as “have you ever been arrested for drugs?” “Is there any reason a dog would alert to drugs if it walked around your car?” and “Do you have any objection to the drug dog walking around your car?”

A lower Florida court ruled in that case that the deputy’s questioning was “purposeless unless its purpose was a fishing expedition and a delaying tactic to allow time for the K-9 unit to arrive.

As the court noted, “had the officer started and completed his traffic duties instead of expending the majority of his time asking the motorist about matters having nothing to do with the issuance of a traffic citation, the stop would have been completed before the dog arrived to conduct a sniff search. Time spent by law enforcement asking such questions can rise to the level of unreasonable delay.”

And as evidenced by Nulph v. State, keeping track of the time and any other unreasonable delay tactics may benefit drivers, even if drugs are found. In this case, an officer stopped a vehicle for careless driving, but knew the driver had a large quantity of methamphetamine.

Because the officer never wrote a ticket for careless driving, but spent about 15 minutes running warrants checks and 20 minutes for a K-9 unit to arrive, the court ruled the stop was unreasonable and called the stop an “illegal detention” and said the seizure of contraband was unconstitutional since the stop was “unreasonably prolonged.”

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