Mythic infallibility of the dog’s nose : unreliable information in law enforcement search and seizure

Abstract

Background: The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guides two social goods exhibiting an essential tension: effective law enforcement search and seizure, and protection of privacy. Unreliable information may subvert the U.S. judicial process. In Fourth Amendment cases involving the use of dogs to sniff out drugs, the validity of this Constitutional guidance is called into question by: the capabilities of the dog, the dog’s training, the nature of human-canine interaction, the questionable objectivity of law enforcement officials who base the legitimacy of their searches upon dogs’ alerts, and the knowledge of judges and lawyers of the capabilities of human-canine search teams. Each of these elements is characterized by and generates many kinds of information. Concerns about such information, however, are major. Objectives: We explore these concerns through a detailed examination of the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision Florida v. Harris, draw some policy conclusions about the implications of this use of unreliable information in the judicial system, and provide a brief summary of the information-centric questions the paper considers.