Canine Search on I-10
May 19, 2015OUTCOME: Motion to Suppress Granted, Case Dismissed
I recently successfully defended a couple who were arrested for possession of narcotics following a traffic stop on I-10 in Washington County. The pair were initially stopped for speeding. Acting on no ... thing more than a hunch, the deputy conducted an "open air" canine sniff of the exterior of the vehicle. The deputy claimed that his canine alerted to the presence of narcotics in the vehicle. After conducting a search of the vehicle, the deputy found various pills that the defendants did not have prescriptions for. I obtained copies of the canine's training and deployment records for the 18 months prior to the defendants' arrest in order to establish the dog's behavioral pattern when alerting. I also obtained a copy of the deputy's dash cam video recording of the canine search of defendants' vehicle. As Judge Patterson noted during the hearing on defendants' motion to suppress the evidence, the dog's behavior on the day of arrest was not consistent with the training records. The Judge was further disturbed when I was able to prove that some of the training records had been "doctored up". The Judge also agreed with me that the length of the traffic stop was much longer than required to issue a speeding ticket as recently decided by the United States Supreme Court on April 21, 2015 in Rodriguez v. United States.
