Texas-Book-Gun Law Armed And Educated - Flipbook - Page 67
G. Dog sniffs
As it applies to vehicles, a dog sniff is not considered a search under
the Fourth Amendment. An officer may detain you for a reasonable
amount of time to await a canine to conduct a sniff. If the dog alerts
on your vehicle, the officer then has probable cause to conduct a
search of the vehicle for narcotics without a warrant. However, a
dog sniff of the front porch of a home is a search under the Fourth
Amendment, and cannot be done in the absence of a warrant. This
is because the dog sniff takes place on the curtilage of the home,
which is a place where the occupant of the home has an expectation
of privacy.
What is a “reasonable” amount of time? Courts examine this
under the totality of the circumstances on a case-by-case basis. For
example, in a large city with many canine officers, it is probably
unreasonable to detain someone for over an hour to await the
dog. In a small county with only one canine officer, this long wait
may not be unreasonable if the dog is out on another crime scene.
Ultimately, the lengths to which an officer is allowed to go to detain
and search a particular person will be fought after the fact in the
courtroom on this kind of “totality of the circumstances” analysis.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Rodriguez v. United States, 575 U.S.
348 (2015), added some clarity to the legality of dog sniff detentions
at the conclusion of a traffic stop. The Court ruled that once the
officer has concluded his investigation into the traffic stop, he may
not detain a citizen to wait for a drug dog without independent
reasonable suspicion that the person is in possession of illegal
narcotics. Expect to see many lengthy traffic stops in the future as
police officers attempt to stay on the right side of this decision.
56 | CHAPTER FOUR
