OFF THE WIRE
By Julian Hattem
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Tuesday that the Constitution forbids
police from holding a suspect without probable cause, even for fewer
than 10 extra minutes.
Writing on behalf of the court, Justice
Ruth Bader Ginsburg declared that the constitutional protections against
unreasonable search and seizure prevent police from extending an
otherwise completed traffic stop to allow for a drug-sniffing dog to
arrive.
“We hold that a police stop exceeding the time needed to
handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the
Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures,” she ruled.
The case, Rodriguez v. United States, was brought by a man who
was pulled over for driving on the shoulder of a Nebraska highway. After
the police pulled him over, checked his license and issued a warning
for his erratic driving, the officer asked whether he could walk his
drug-sniffing dog around the vehicle.
The driver, Dennys
Rodriguez, refused. However, the officer nonetheless detained him for
“seven or eight minutes” until a backup officer arrived. Then, the
original officer retrieved his dog.
After sniffing around the car,
the dog detected drugs, and Rodriguez was indicted for possessing
methamphetamine. In all, the stop lasted less than 30 minutes.
According
to the Supreme Court, though, that search of Rodriguez’s car was
illegal, and the evidence gathered in it should not be used at trial.
While officers may use a dog to sniff around a car during the course of a
routine traffic stop, they cannot extend the length of the stop in
order to carry it out.
“[T]he tolerable duration of police
inquiries in the traffic-stop context is determined by the seizure’s
‘mission’ — to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop,”
Ginsburg ruled. “Authority for the seizure thus ends when tasks tied to
the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been —
completed.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony
Kennedy disagreed with the ruling, arguing that police can reasonably
detain people to investigate other possible violations of the law.
In
his dissenting opinion, Thomas said that majority’s ruling makes
“meaningless" the legal difference between “reasonable suspicion”
— which does not authorize a search of someone’s property — and
“probable cause," which does.
“Had Officer Struble arrested,
handcuffed, and taken Rodriguez to the police station for his traffic
violation, he would have complied with the Fourth Amendment,” he wrote,
using the majority’s argument.
“But because he made Rodriguez wait
for seven or eight extra minutes until a dog arrived, he evidently
committed a constitutional violation. Such a view of the Fourth
Amendment makes little sense.”
