Legal limits for drug-sniffing dogs

The Supreme Court ruled this week that police could not bring a drug-sniffing dog onto a suspect’s property without a warrant. In a 5–4 decision, the court decided that using a dog to sniff the interior of a home, even if it did not enter, constituted a search under the Fourth Amendment. The ruling upheld a Florida Supreme Court decision to invalidate a warrant granted after a drug-sniffing dog detected marijuana inside a house from the front porch. A policeman can knock on a door without a warrant, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia, “but introducing a trained police dog to explore the area around the home in hopes of discovering incriminating evidence is something else.”

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