Court Opinion

ID: 9854808
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 06:14:24.407849+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:23:25.863728
License: Public Domain

DYKMAN, J.
¶ 16. (concurring). United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983), and State v. Garcia, 195 Wis. 2d 68, 535 N.W.2d 124 (Ct. App. 1995), require a conclusion that the police did not violate Miller's Fourth Amendment rights when they conducted a dog sniff on her car. I write separately, however, to explain why the federal rule should not be applied automatically when interpreting the Wisconsin Constitution.
¶ 17. Place's dicta that a dog sniff of luggage is not a search is based on the premise that a dog sniff *91infringes on no legitimate expectation of privacy because it "discloses only the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item." 462 U.S. at 707. This rationale has serious weaknesses. First, it assumes that the dog is accurate, and that the privacy interests of innocents will not be compromised. This is not the case, however, as was shown in Doe v. Renfrow, 475 F. Supp. 1012 (N.D. Ind. 1979), aff'd, in part, 631 F.2d 91 (7th Cir. 1980). In Doe, officials at a junior high school in Indiana became concerned that a drug problem existed among some of the students. Id. at 1016. The school superintendent decided to use drug-sniffing dogs to combat the problem. Id. The dogs were walked down the aisles in each classroom as the students sat in their desks. Id.
¶ 18. One of the dogs alerted on student Diane Doe. Id. at 1017. She was instructed to empty her pockets and her purse so that their contents could be checked for drugs. Id. No drugs were found. Id. Doe was then taken to the nurse's station. Id. She was asked if she had ever used marijuana and Doe replied that she had not. Id. She was then told to remove her clothing and officials conducted a strip search. Id. Still, no drugs or other illegal substances were found. Id. Doe demonstrates that, when no suspicion is required before a canine sniff is performed, there is a heightened risk that innocents will be subjected to unwarranted searches. See also United States v. Kelly, 128 F. Supp. 2d 1021, 1026-27 (S.D. Tex 2001) (holding that trained dog's alert on a person is sufficient to justify a strip search under certain circumstances).
¶ 19. Both Doe and Forbes's testimony in this case show that the accuracy of drug-sniffing dogs is far from *92perfect.1 Forbes testified that the dog who performed the sniff on Miller's car had incorrectly alerted five times out of a total of forty. Although thirty-five out of forty is a fairly high average, the five people who were wrongly implicated as being involved with illegal drugs likely think that it is not high enough. Because judges usually learn only about cases in which police find incriminating evidence, we may tend to forget that mistakes can intrude significantly on the legitimate expectation of privacy that innocent people have. It does little to acknowledge that wronged innocents may file a civil action for a Fourth Amendment violation, as under current jurisprudence, officials are often granted immunity from suit. In Doe's case, for instance, although the court found that the Fourth Amendment was violated, it concluded that school officials were not liable because they acted in good faith. Doe, 475 F. Supp. at 1028.
*93¶ 20. A second problem in concluding that dog sniffs are not searches is that it allows the police nearly absolute discretion in who and what they target. It permits law enforcement officers to randomly walk dogs down any street, approach any person, and sniff any package for any or no reason. See Kenneth R. Wallen-tine, Dogs Are a Prosecutor's Best Friend: Canine Search and Seizure Law, Prosecutor 31 (Sept./Oct. 1997) (encouraging law enforcement to use canine sniffs in public parks, parking lots, trains, roadblocks, storage units, rental lockers and with respect to mail packages because they provide "probable cause on a silver platter").
¶ 21. Such discretion has consequences for more than just the guilty. Many law-abiding individuals would feel uneasy at the prospect of their cars or homes being sniffed at any time, or being subject to random canine sniffs of their person in public places. See 1 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 2.1(e), at 315 (2d ed. 1986) ("If the issue is framed in terms of whether a totally unrestrained use of such dogs in a dragnet fashion would be tolerable in a free society, one's answer might likely be no."). Especially for members of minority groups, the risk that such techniques could be used selectively is also worrisome when there are no constitutional limitations, outside of a possible equal protection claim, on when a dog sniff may be used. See People v. Dunn, 564 N.E.2d 1054, 1058 (N.Y. 1990) ("To hold [that a canine sniff is not a search], we believe would raise the specter of the police roaming indiscriminately through the corridors of public housing projects with trained dogs in search of drugs."). Courts have a constitutional duty to ensure that individuals are not subjected to searches without reason. See Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 15 (1968) (stating that courts have a *94"responsibility to guard against police conduct which is over-bearing or harassing").
¶ 22. Like Place, our decision in Garcia is also grounded in the Fourth Amendment, but it uses a different rationale. Instead of following Place's logic that dog sniffs are not searches because they detect only illegal conduct, Garcia concluded that individuals have no legitimate expectation of privacy in the air space around their cars. Garcia, 195 Wis. 2d at 75.
¶ 23. The reasoning, if not the holding, of Garcia was recently rejected by the Supreme Court. In Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), the Court considered whether the use of a thermal imaging device on a home constituted a "search" under the Fourth Amendment. The Government argued that it did not because the device detected "only heat radiating from the external surface of the house," or in other words, that there is no expectation of privacy in the air around one's house. Id. at 35. The Court disagreed, concluding that this was "a mechanical interpretation" of the Fourth Amendment and that it was the information the device revealed about activities within the home that was the proper focus. Id.2 After Kyllo, a view that police conduct is not *95a search simply because it extracts information from the air around a protected object, rather than directly invading the object, may no longer be viable.
¶ 24. Concerned that the unrestrained use of canine sniffs would lead to unreasonable intrusions on individuals' legitimate expectations of privacy, a number of state courts have decided not to follow the federal rule when interpreting their own state constitutions and instead have concluded that dog sniffs can be searches. See Pooley v. State, 705 P.2d 1293 (Alaska Ct. App. 1985); People v. Unruh, 713 P.2d 370 (Colo. 1986); People v. Cox, 739 N.E.2d 1066 (Ill. App. Ct. 2000); State v. Pellicci, 580 A.2d 710 (N.H. 1990); People v. Dunn, 564 N.E.2d 1054 (N.Y. 1990); Commonwealth v. Johnston, 530 A.2d 74, 79 (Fa. 1987) ("[I]t is our view that a free society will not remain free if police may use this, or any other crime detection device, at random and without reason."). For example the court in Pellicci stated:
Employing a trained canine to sniff a person's private vehicle in order to determine whether controlled substances are concealed inside is certainly a search.... The drug detection dog discerned something not otherwise apparent to the officers through their own senses, aided or unaided, and advised them of what the dog had discovered by means the officers could perceive. The very purpose of bringing the dog to the vehicle was to have it detect any contraband that might *96be hidden inside. The sniff, in short, was a prying by officers into the contents of Pellicci's possession, which, concealed as they were from public view, could not have been evident to the officers before the prying began.
580 A.2d at 716. New York's highest court similarly rejected Place's view that dog sniffs are not searches because they disclose only evidence of criminality: "Notwithstanding such a method's discriminate and nonin-trusive nature, it remains a way of detecting the contents of a private place. Thus, our analysis should more appropriately focus on whether there has been an intrusion into an area where an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy." Dunn, 564 N.E.2d at 1057-58 (citations omitted).3
¶ 25. These courts have generally followed Justice Blackmun's suggestion in his concurrence in Place, and held that dog sniffs can be searches, but because of their minimal intrusiveness, they are akin to a Terry stop, and thus require only reasonable suspicion before they can be conducted on a person or object in which a person possesses a privacy interest. But see Commonwealth v. Martin, 626 A.2d 556 (Pa. 1993) (holding that probable cause is required when a dog sniff is performed on a person). This conclusion is consistent with the leading treatise on search and seizure, which also suggested that courts find a middle ground between a *97full warrant requirement and no requirement at all. 1 Wayne R. LaFave, Search and Seizure § 2.2(f), at 461-64 (3d ed. 1996).
¶ 26. The application of art. I, § 11 to canine sniffs has not yet been decided, even by Garcia, which limited its consideration to the federal constitution. And I find persuasive the reasoning of the various commentators and out-of-state decisions that have rejected Place, and concluded that dog sniffs are searches under their state constitutions. Although the Wisconsin Supreme Court has generally held that our search and seizure law under art I., § 11 should conform to Supreme Court jurisprudence, e.g., State v. Guy, 172 Wis. 2d 86, 93, 492 N.W.2d 311 (1992), it is also true that we may interpret state constitutional provisions more expansively than does the Supreme Court with respect to their federal counterparts, State v. Hansford, 219 Wis. 2d 226, 242, 580 N.W.2d 171 (1998). Further, our supreme court has recently stated that it should not act "as [a] mere rubber stamp[ of the U.S. Supreme Court]" when interpreting art. I, § 11 and that it "is our responsibility to examine the State Constitution independently." State v. Ward, 2000 WI 3, ¶ 59, 231 Wis. 2d 723, 604 N.W.2d 517. Because our supreme court generally follows the Supreme Court's view of federal counterparts to the Wisconsin Constitution, this court is not free to ignore that jurisprudence. This case, however, would serve as a vehicle to provide Wisconsin residents with protection against random dog-sniff searches that the residents of Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, New Hampshire, New York and Pennsylvania enjoy.

 At least one court has opined that the reason dogs may alert incorrectly is the high percentage of cash that contains sufficient quantities of cocaine to alert a dog. United States v. Six Hundred Thirty-Nine Thousand Five Hundred Fifty-Eight Dollars ($639,558) in U.S. Currency, 955 F.2d 712, 714 n.2 (D.C. Cir. 1992). The court stated that experts have concluded that anywhere from seventy to ninety-seven percent of all currency in the United States is contaminated by minute, but detectable, amounts of cocaine. Id. Obviously, no matter how well trained a dog is at detecting narcotics, this issue could still lead to inaccurate results.
For other discussions on the accuracy of dog sniffs, see Robert C. Bird, An Examination of the Training and Reliability of the Narcotics Detection Dog, 85 Ky. L.J. 405, 408-09 (1996-97), and Andrew E. Taslitz, Does the Cold Nose Know? The Unscientific Myth of the Dog Scent Lineup, 42 Hastings L.J. 17 (1990).

 Although the majority opinion in Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), did not discuss United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696 (1983), some courts have concluded that Kyllo undermines the logic behind a conclusion that dog sniffs are not searches. See, e.g., People v. Haley, 41 P.3d 666, 671 n.2 (Colo. 2001). This view is buttressed by the dissent in Kyllo, which argued that the majority's reasoning was inconsistent with Place. Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 4748 (Stevens, J., dissenting). Although there may be some tension between the two decisions, the use of dog sniffs and thermal imaging devices can be distinguished in that thermal imaging devices reveal both less and more than a dog sniff. They reveal less in the sense that a *95thermal imaging device does not detect illegal activity directly, but only determines how much and where heat is emanating from a home. Thermal imaging devices reveal more because details learned through such devices may have nothing to do with illegal activity. An example provided by Justice Scalia in Kyllo was that a thermal imaging device could reveal "at which hour each night the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath." Id. at 38.

 See also United States v. Beale, 736 F.2d 1289, 1293 (9th Cir. 1984) (Pregerson, J., dissenting). Judge Pregerson wrote:
When using dogs to ferret out contraband, the police are not simply walking around hoping to come across evidence of a crime. Instead, they are investigating. They are trying to find something. They are seeking evidence in hidden places. If this activity does not qualify as a "search" then I am not sure what does.