What we need is a constitutional amendment that says:
"Hey. Hey assholes. Stuffing grubby wads of cash into a political candidates pocket isn't "speech"."
I'd word it something like:
"Congress shall agree upon a sum of money that each candidate for Federal office such as Senator, Congressman or President can use to campaign for election. It shall be unlawful for candidates or any other person to use any other resources to affect the outcome of an election, referendum or any other free vote."
Dunno how constitutionally kosher that is, but I'm not a lawyer. I also know it's unlikely this would ever get ratified, but a guy can dream.
I'm almost at the level where i think contributions to officials not in your state or district should be illegal. CU failed on the federal level we all know that. but on the state level it's bought and sold entire legislatures in Michigan and Ohio which turned around and engaged in absurd anti-worker legislation. Those people were elected mostly with out of state money.
I'd agree with you for state legislators. Anyone running for federal offices in my book shouldn't be under that rule.
Why? Congressmen represent a specific 700k people just as much as state legislators do.
Then we get into the fun question of what district "McDonalds" or "Walmart" are in.
Aren't they all incorporated in Delaware for the taxes?
Many are (for the robust body of corporate law and well educated judges, not taxes), but they have their headquarters elsewhere in most cases.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it
A situation in which the handler has an existing expectation of the animal's behavior is exactly the Clever Hans problem space.
The police officer's suspicion makes the drug dog less reliable, not more.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this is a theory, and there is some research to back it, but it is not something that has been proven w/r/t police dogs. If it is true, then this may well go to the reasonableness of the reliance. Nothing in this opinion precludes a determination that a reasonable prudent man would require that drug sniffing dogs be handled by people other than their trainers, for example.
But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it
A situation in which the handler has an existing expectation of the animal's behavior is exactly the Clever Hans problem space.
The police officer's suspicion makes the drug dog less reliable, not more.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this is a theory, and there is some research to back it, but it is not something that has been proven w/r/t police dogs. If it is true, then this may well go to the reasonableness of the reliance. Nothing in this opinion precludes a determination that a reasonable prudent man would require that drug sniffing dogs be handled by people other than their trainers, for example.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
But they got the guy this time! So it's good! In the end, the means were justified! Yay!
Now the other half of that is that operation of a motor vehicle implies consent to most searches. But I think that's mostly breathalyzer and such, not drug stops.
Well the other part is that the testimony of dogs is not admissible in court under any circumstances, it's just considered sufficient grounds to execute a search without a search warrant. Anything recovered as a consequence of this search is the evidence that's admissible. Whereas the breathalyzer is itself the search, and the results are the admissible evidence.
I ultimately agree with you, it's just not quite a perfect analogy. The dog's reaction itself isn't evidence of a crime any more than a judge signing a search warrant is evidence of a crime, but neither is it something that you could have implicitly consented to by putting your keys in the ignition.
Aaaand someone already said as much while I was typing. Okay.
SammyF on
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding.
I don't understand how you can't understand that sentence, it's in pretty clear English. Even a lawyer could understand it
I think you are forgetting that IF dogs cannot be a factor in finding probable cause, accepting them as such makes you a moron.
You see, the idea is that we move our legal system beyond this kind of thing:
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
SammyF on
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Now the other half of that is that operation of a motor vehicle implies consent to most searches. But I think that's mostly breathalyzer and such, not drug stops.
Well the other part is that the testimony of dogs is not admissible in court under any circumstances, it's just considered sufficient grounds to execute a search without a search warrant. Anything recovered as a consequence of this search is the evidence that's admissible. Whereas the breathalyzer is itself the search, and the results are the admissible evidence.
I ultimately agree with you, it's just not quite a perfect analogy. The dog's reaction itself isn't evidence of a crime any more than a judge signing a search warrant is evidence of a crime, but neither is it something that you could have implicitly consented to by putting your keys in the ignition.
Aaaand someone already said as much while I was typing. Okay.
Sure, and I'm not saying that a cop can't have more than one thing leading to probable cause. Alls I'm saying is that if dogs don't give us accurate results maybe we should stop using them.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
What are the rates on searches with probable cause derived from non-dog sources?
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
What are the rates on searches with probable cause derived from non-dog sources?
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
Probably the most important component of the system is that we try very, very hard to prevent probable cause being used in a racist way. There's quite a few types of tickets you can get while driving that aren't primary offenses, meaning that cops can't pull you over and ticket you for JUST that thing. Texting is a good example of this in some states. In those states, there's probably a pretty high incidence of people texting while driving and not getting pulled over for it.
Now, texting while driving is bad and should be stopped. But if you give cops the ability to pull over at their discretion for this particular offense based on their innate bias, you see a much higher rate of minorities being pulled over and ticketed. This isn't a fair application of the law. It's not that ticketing people for unsafe driving is a bad thing, it's that being able to stop someone and check them for rules that might be broken is no good because it leads to too much law enforcement in daily life, and without checks it has a higher impact on minorities.
The drug dog problem faces the same thing. Setting aside that some people will disagree with the war on drugs entirely, EVERYONE should be able to agree that selectively enforcing a particular law primarily against minorities is a problem. Because of the way we structure probable cause laws, there are far more offenders than we catch. But selectively granting additional searches due to drug dog probably cause results in more enforcement against minorities, and that's just a big no no. It's far better to always design the system so that particular problem doesn't arise.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
What are the rates on searches with probable cause derived from non-dog sources?
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
What a cop can do is impound a car, tear the upholstery out, and then charge the owner a few hundred dollars in impound fees to get the car back.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
The ticket analogy does not work, as the red light camera and parking meter are both uses as evidence (the sole evidence actually) to support the fine, where as the sniff is not evidence at all. It is only used as part of the determination of whether a search which finds actual evidence is itself lawful.
Waving a carelessly broad and angry fist at nuanced issues like campaign finance and free speech doesn't really serve anyone very much. It's par for the course on the CU decision, I guess. It was so widely misreported in the media that there was little chance of an informed public discussion.
That won't stop me from trying to clear up a few things. Although it doesn't seem to have come up here, I still want to point out first that the CU case never said anything about corporations being people. Nothing at all. U.S. Code Title 1 Chapter 1 pretty clearly says that person = corporation, but nothing in the CU case anything to do with that, and the decision was pretty clear that whether or not corporations are people wasn't relevant.
What has come up here is the "money = speech" thing. That was briefly touched on in the CU decision, but it is a long-standing and well-supported legal principle. And it's often over-generalized. It isn't that giving money is the same thing as speaking. The point is that regulating money as a proxy for censorship is the same thing as censorship. For example, a law banning actors from being paid for any work done in a movie that depicts homosexuality... such a law might be argued as only about money, and doesn't ban or censor anything. Except of course it does. It's using money regulation as a proxy for censorship. Be honest about what's going on.
Obviously no one ever ruled that spending money has carte blanche protection under the First. All sorts of financial transactions are regulated and/or banned. There is no over-arching principal whatsoever that money = speech unless speech is already what the issue is actually about.
I see this case (and the ones above) as an inevitable follow-up to CU, and a path down the slippery slope to corporations just outright sponsoring candidates. Sadly, with the precedent of CU, and a 5-4 split with the majority being GOP hacks, I see the above case as virtually inevitable. Hopefully we can get CU overturned and / or some real campaign finance reform soon.
Not sure if anyone was paying attention, but the CU case was about the Federal government banning a movie. That is what makes it at least up for discussion as a First Amendment concern. The federal government banned a movie during election season because they were concerned that the movie was spreading politics that are bad for America... you could not more perfectly describe the exact thing that the First Amendment was written to prevent. The exact thing, the very first thing, that was added to the Constitution that the people wanted to make sure the government wasn't allowed to do.
It's my job (my right) to decide if I want to listen or agree. You could spend 41 hojillion dollars on laser-beam messages on the moon and it wouldn't have gotten me to vote for Romney. It wouldn't even have gotten me to read the message in the first place. But that was all on me.
This is the element of free speech that everyone seems so willing to assume and gloss over: that the people will listen to and agree with whatever is put in front of them, and thus it is up to the government to make sure they only hear messages that are politically proper. If a corporation can advertise for a candidate, well then that candidate is naturally going to win, because everyone will blindly believe and agree. And corporations are inherently evil and bad for us. Now, not only is there a lot of evidence that it actually doesn't work this way, but the very idea of it is wholly contradictory to free speech to begin with. If you don't trust your fellow humans to think critically about what they see and hear, to seek out more information on what they are interested in and ignore messages they aren't, then free speech is not a political ideal you support. The middle is excluded; it's one or the other. So long as you claim to believe that free speech is important to a healthy society, then you are saying that you trust your fellow humans to make informed decisions about any political message they might see and hear (more so than not, anyway), and that it isn't up to you to decide what politics will be "bad" if they are allowed to think about them.
It is far, far less clear that giving money to a candidate has anything to do with someone's right to freedom of speech. If the federal government isn't banning a movie, then there doesn't seem to be such an obvious problem with telling a person or a corporation or a candidate that they can't engage in a transaction of a certain nature. So I really don't see the slope as all that slippery. I'm pretty sure that donations will remain regulated.
As for drug dogs, I think that is kinda like the lie detector. It works, except not the way people thinks it does. It works because the suspect believes it works, and is thus intimidated into self-incrimination. I don't know that much about drug dogs but I imagine this is why people support their use even if they aren't that accurate all the time. My view is that if we didn't have such a hard-on for drug enforcement (or, alternatively, such a distaste for it) to begin with, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. No one is going to rush to the defense of a terrorist whose bomb was sniffed by a bomb-sniffing dog that didn't have his paperwork up to code.
The ultimate goal here is to prevent communities and the authorities in those communities from becoming accustomed to frequent and unjustified searches and seizures, not without real good reason (like bombs), because otherwise it becomes all too easy for political sway to suddenly turn "drug dogs" into "thought criminal dogs" or "border enforcement dogs" or "sexual deviancy detecting dogs" or whatever. As such, I'm thinking it probably is important that we are very clear about what is or isn't ok when it comes to dogs. If the paperwork isn't there, then let's not be lax about it.
Yar on
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
Yeah, pretty much.
The only sane response to the quoted text is "Ha ha. No."
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yeah, you don't weigh "inconvenience of a possible rights violation" against "letting a guilty man go free." Not in the appeals / supreme courts. That's not how it works. Those courts are supposed to concern themselves with the former and not much care about the latter, unless the law gives clear direction otherwise.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
What are the rates on searches with probable cause derived from non-dog sources?
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
Probably the most important component of the system is that we try very, very hard to prevent probable cause being used in a racist way. There's quite a few types of tickets you can get while driving that aren't primary offenses, meaning that cops can't pull you over and ticket you for JUST that thing. Texting is a good example of this in some states. In those states, there's probably a pretty high incidence of people texting while driving and not getting pulled over for it.
Now, texting while driving is bad and should be stopped. But if you give cops the ability to pull over at their discretion for this particular offense based on their innate bias, you see a much higher rate of minorities being pulled over and ticketed. This isn't a fair application of the law. It's not that ticketing people for unsafe driving is a bad thing, it's that being able to stop someone and check them for rules that might be broken is no good because it leads to too much law enforcement in daily life, and without checks it has a higher impact on minorities.
The drug dog problem faces the same thing. Setting aside that some people will disagree with the war on drugs entirely, EVERYONE should be able to agree that selectively enforcing a particular law primarily against minorities is a problem. Because of the way we structure probable cause laws, there are far more offenders than we catch. But selectively granting additional searches due to drug dog probably cause results in more enforcement against minorities, and that's just a big no no. It's far better to always design the system so that particular problem doesn't arise.
The problem here is that the source of error comes from the LEO not from the dog. Dogs, as far as i know, aren't racist. This is why i asked for numbers of successful searches outside of dog use.
As an asinine example; we search people every day because they want to board an air plane. The success rate on that is about a close to zero as you can get with out actually hitting it. Obviously, a low success rate is not enough of a reason to stop searches.
Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
Yeah, pretty much.
The only sane response to the quoted text is "Ha ha. No."
Consequentialist, Ends-Justify-Means, v bad.
I mean, if racial profiling stops terrorism then...
Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
Yeah, pretty much.
The only sane response to the quoted text is "Ha ha. No."
Consequentialist, Ends-Justify-Means, v bad.
I mean, if racial profiling stops terrorism then...
FYI, I consider myself a consequentialist.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
The problem here is that the source of error comes from the LEO not from the dog. Dogs, as far as i know, aren't racist. This is why i asked for numbers of successful searches outside of dog use.
Meh, that question isn't really relevant to the dog question.
If it turns out that dogs are more accurate than other methods, it's still conceivable that this is because other methods are simply even more egregiously inaccurate.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
Taking that as sufficient reason for a search, the officer checked out the interior of the vehicle, turning up materials known to police as the ingredients for making methamphetamine. Harris was told of his legal rights. He told the officer he was addicted to the drug, and had been “cooking” it recently. His lawyers sought to bar from the trial the evidence of the drug-making materials, but the judge rejected the challenge. Harris then entered a no-contest plea, but kept open the right to challenge the justification for the search. He was sentenced to two years in prison and five years on probation.
Right except that supplies to cook meth aren't meth itself. The dog wasn't correct.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
What are the rates on searches with probable cause derived from non-dog sources?
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
Probably the most important component of the system is that we try very, very hard to prevent probable cause being used in a racist way. There's quite a few types of tickets you can get while driving that aren't primary offenses, meaning that cops can't pull you over and ticket you for JUST that thing. Texting is a good example of this in some states. In those states, there's probably a pretty high incidence of people texting while driving and not getting pulled over for it.
Now, texting while driving is bad and should be stopped. But if you give cops the ability to pull over at their discretion for this particular offense based on their innate bias, you see a much higher rate of minorities being pulled over and ticketed. This isn't a fair application of the law. It's not that ticketing people for unsafe driving is a bad thing, it's that being able to stop someone and check them for rules that might be broken is no good because it leads to too much law enforcement in daily life, and without checks it has a higher impact on minorities.
The drug dog problem faces the same thing. Setting aside that some people will disagree with the war on drugs entirely, EVERYONE should be able to agree that selectively enforcing a particular law primarily against minorities is a problem. Because of the way we structure probable cause laws, there are far more offenders than we catch. But selectively granting additional searches due to drug dog probably cause results in more enforcement against minorities, and that's just a big no no. It's far better to always design the system so that particular problem doesn't arise.
The problem here is that the source of error comes from the LEO not from the dog. Dogs, as far as i know, aren't racist. This is why i asked for numbers of successful searches outside of dog use.
As an asinine example; we search people every day because they want to board an air plane. The success rate on that is about a close to zero as you can get with out actually hitting it. Obviously, a low success rate is not enough of a reason to stop searches.
Not that I want to give the impression that I'm supporting the TSA, but that's an indiscriminate search, at least. I think we'd get a whoooooole lot madder, faster, if the TSA mostly only grabbed the latinos to go through the backscatter.
The federal government banned a movie during election season because they were concerned that the movie was spreading politics that are bad for America... you could not more perfectly describe the exact thing that the First Amendment was written to prevent.
No. The movie was about a political subject that was due to be involved in an election, the Democratic primaries in 2008. That movie was interpreted as being political advertising, because that's exactly what it was, and spending on that was heavily restricted. The character of the movie was completely irrelevant; it didn't matter how toxic or beneficial the footage was, only that it was political.
Yes, political. Again, being the exact sort of thing the First Amendment was likely concerned with. I'm pretty sure free speech isn't primarily about your right to porn or pretty pictures. It's about your right to political discourse.
As I said, the government didn't like the politics of a message and banned it. If that isn't First Amendment, there isn't a First Amendment.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Unfortunately, math (statistics in particular) and the scientific method argues even more strongly against it.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
All I was trying to say is that reasonableness is, for lack of a better word, a pretty reasonable standard to adopt in assessing whether the police should rely on something. The idea of using a witch to find drugs is pretty silly, but then the police don't routinely engage in the use of them. I think that the fact that our entire nation's police forces (including federal police) use drug sniffing dogs is pretty clear evidence that it is currently reasonable to use them as a method for investigating drug crimes. You can have objections, and that is fine, and it may be that we should reevaluate the method, but until we do so, saying that a pillar of standard police work which the supreme court just upheld is unreasonable in all circumstances is a bold claim.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
All I was trying to say is that reasonableness is, for lack of a better word, a pretty reasonable standard to adopt in assessing whether the police should rely on something. The idea of using a witch to find drugs is pretty silly, but then the police don't routinely engage in the use of them. I think that the fact that our entire nation's police forces (including federal police) use drug sniffing dogs is pretty clear evidence that it is currently reasonable to use them as a method for investigating drug crimes. You can have objections, and that is fine, and it may be that we should reevaluate the method, but until we do so, saying that a pillar of standard police work which the supreme court just upheld is unreasonable in all circumstances is a bold claim.
No, we don't have "objections".
What we have is statistical proof, both from analysis of real world data and from scientific study, that the core aspect of the legitimacy of the use of drug dogs - that the results that they return are based purely on the physical scene alone - is severely questionable at best. Compared to that, the argument of consensus pales to be meaningless. Furthermore, your consensus argument is further weakened by the fact that the group reaching consensus is not impartial to the argument.
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
Taking that as sufficient reason for a search, the officer checked out the interior of the vehicle, turning up materials known to police as the ingredients for making methamphetamine. Harris was told of his legal rights. He told the officer he was addicted to the drug, and had been “cooking” it recently. His lawyers sought to bar from the trial the evidence of the drug-making materials, but the judge rejected the challenge. Harris then entered a no-contest plea, but kept open the right to challenge the justification for the search. He was sentenced to two years in prison and five years on probation.
Right except that supplies to cook meth aren't meth itself. The dog wasn't correct.
The man appeared to be on drugs to the police officer. The dog may well have smelled drugs that had been in the car in the past, or maybe the guy smelled like meth because he cooks it without proper ventilation. If the officer has PC to suspect that someone has drugs and finds a gun, the gun is not off limits as evidence. Again, the standard SCOTUS has adopted is reasonableness, so this is not open season on searches just by bringing a dog anywhere in the world and waiting for it to signal.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
I think this is the right decision. Why wouldn't a trained drug sniffing dog's alert that there may be drugs in a car be probable cause for a search, particularly where, as here, the officer was already suspicious based on the driver's behavior? To be clear, the alternative is to overturn a case where a meth addict who cooks meth was caught with supplies to cook meth, and where the dog accurately detected it, based on a lack of a sufficient pedigree for the dog, who was in fact correct?
This is consequentialist Ends Justify Means thinking.
Which is bad.
v bad.
I disagree. This ruling does not give carte blanche to the police to use dogs in place of warrants in all cases. But if you are in a situation where the police officer has reason to suspect drugs, and the dog confirms it, then I would much rather have that search be upheld, especially since the risk of false positives is just the inconvenience of having your car searched, where as the risk of throwing out the search is letting people we in fact know have committed a crime go free. I understand the need to enforce the procedure to protect the innocent, but I just don't think that this case is undermining the process, and as a general matter, I am in favor of rulings that minimize the number of cases where criminals walk free based on evidence that was discovered through reasonable actions by the police (and this case explicitly requires that the action be reasonable) being thrown out.
If dogs give false positives then evidence from that shouldn't be admissible. Lie detector tests aren't admissible for this very reason.
Lie detectors are not admissible as evidence. Noone is saying that the dog's sniff be admitted as evidence. Just that it be able to form part of the probable cause needed to search, and that the evidence discovered by this search be admissible.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
All I was trying to say is that reasonableness is, for lack of a better word, a pretty reasonable standard to adopt in assessing whether the police should rely on something. The idea of using a witch to find drugs is pretty silly, but then the police don't routinely engage in the use of them. I think that the fact that our entire nation's police forces (including federal police) use drug sniffing dogs is pretty clear evidence that it is currently reasonable to use them as a method for investigating drug crimes. You can have objections, and that is fine, and it may be that we should reevaluate the method, but until we do so, saying that a pillar of standard police work which the supreme court just upheld is unreasonable in all circumstances is a bold claim.
No, we don't have "objections".
What we have is statistical proof, both from analysis of real world data and from scientific study, that the core aspect of the legitimacy of the use of drug dogs - that the results that they return are based purely on the physical scene alone - is severely questionable at best. Compared to that, the argument of consensus pales to be meaningless. Furthermore, your consensus argument is further weakened by the fact that the group reaching consensus is not impartial to the argument.
The study Feral cited did not conclude that we should stop using the dogs, or that they can't be effective. It concluded that we should do further research and use that to cut down on behavioral cues. Maybe that will become part of the determination of when it is reasonable to rely on a dog's sniff. All that SCOTUS did was reject a post facto list of criteria that a dog must satisfy in order for it's sniff to be part of probable cause.
Edit: From Feral's link:
“It is important to recognize that these findings do not mitigate the abilities of these handler/dog teams to perform successfully. Our data, together with our previous findings and those of other researchers, continue to emphasize that many cognitive factors can affect handlers, dogs and the handler-dog dyad. Further research is required to characterize these factors in order to optimize working dog and handler performance. Also importantly, the sensitivity of dogs to social cues as suggested by this study points to the potential to develop good models to study social behavior.”
SCOTUS also wildly expanded the scope of CU to rip down a whole bunch of rules about financing of elections they were ideologically opposed to which had very little to do with the case. That was the travesty of the ruling.
I mean, the thing was still a political ad, and that kind of thing needs to be regulated. I mean we just had a judge in Ohio convicted this week, and Jesse Jackson Jr. pled guilty today because wooo public corruption. But they went far beyond what the actual case was about and sold the country even further to the donor class. Which is why we're currently obsessed with debt and not 8 fucking percent unemployment.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS is like 50/50 to take down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which will be this court's second entree in the five worst SCOTUS decisions ever.
Self-righteousness is incompatible with coalition building.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
The argument "but cops are using the dogs" is not a strong one to the question of "If dogs aren't reliable, should we keep using them"
I'm sure anyone who has left grade school could understand that.
You're not being serious.
People should stop replying to you. I know I am.
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spacekungfumanPoor and minority-filledRegistered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The argument "but cops are using the dogs" is not a strong one to the question of "If dogs aren't reliable, should we keep using them"
I'm sure anyone who has left grade school could understand that.
You're not being serious.
People should stop replying to you. I know I am.
Whether we should make changes in their use is a different question from if we should consider investigations carried out in compliance with standard police procedures as reasonable until a change is made.
There is almost no difference between using a drug dog and just letting the cop decide who he wants to search.
Jesus, it's that fucking simple. If you're ok with letting the police search at will based on their gut instinct without further need for probable cause, then yes, the dog is a great way to manufacture it.
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Many are (for the robust body of corporate law and well educated judges, not taxes), but they have their headquarters elsewhere in most cases.
And that is dumb.
If dogs don't accurately give you probably cause they shouldn't be able to be used as probable cause. I don't really know what more there is to say on this particular case.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that this is a theory, and there is some research to back it, but it is not something that has been proven w/r/t police dogs. If it is true, then this may well go to the reasonableness of the reliance. Nothing in this opinion precludes a determination that a reasonable prudent man would require that drug sniffing dogs be handled by people other than their trainers, for example.
http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/20110223_drug_dogs.html
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I don't understand your sentence. Probable cause can be derived from a mixture of factors, and if you already have reason to suspect drugs, the dog's sniff can just be one more factor in favor of a finding. Edit: to be clear, we are discussing whether actual evidence of a crime which we know 100% was committed should be thrown out over a failure of a dog to have been trained in accordance with a list of factors that the court who threw out the evidence made up after the fact. SCOTUS has rejected this approach and said that you can use the sniff as part of your finding of probable cause if it is reasonable to do so.
But they got the guy this time! So it's good! In the end, the means were justified! Yay!
Well the other part is that the testimony of dogs is not admissible in court under any circumstances, it's just considered sufficient grounds to execute a search without a search warrant. Anything recovered as a consequence of this search is the evidence that's admissible. Whereas the breathalyzer is itself the search, and the results are the admissible evidence.
I ultimately agree with you, it's just not quite a perfect analogy. The dog's reaction itself isn't evidence of a crime any more than a judge signing a search warrant is evidence of a crime, but neither is it something that you could have implicitly consented to by putting your keys in the ignition.
Aaaand someone already said as much while I was typing. Okay.
I don't understand how you can't understand that sentence, it's in pretty clear English. Even a lawyer could understand it
I think you are forgetting that IF dogs cannot be a factor in finding probable cause, accepting them as such makes you a moron.
You see, the idea is that we move our legal system beyond this kind of thing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=olWcc7kIzDI
Not bring it closer to it.
In artificial testing circumstances, dogs return a false positives 12.5 - 60 percent of the time. At best, 1 in 8 indications that give the police probable cause to search are predicated on false information. That's very bad.
In real life circumstances, alerts from dogs lead to drugs or paraphernalia 44% of the time, for Hispanic drivers only 27% of the time. The takeaway is that in the real world - mostly situations where the police already are suspicious before calling the dog in, the dogs are still wrong well over half the time. If the driver is hispanic, it's almost 3/4 of the time.
If we had red light cameras that randomly gave one in eight drivers a ticket even though they had a green light, or parking meters that randomly would indicate the driver hadn't paid 1/8 of the time, people would be IRATE.
Yet, we have dogs that - again, at best - are wrong 1/8 of the time, and are used as probable cause for search based on that. No warrant, simply because the dog indicated there may be drugs.
That's one way of looking at it, Space. The other way of looking at it is by saying that while we may have to overturn the conviction of one criminal here, should the inaccurate assessment of a poorly trained, subservient quadraped be considered sufficient grounds for PC to search the cars of anyone and everyone, even those who are not criminals?
If I go to a wicca organization's website and hire a witch, and that witch uses her magic staff to alert me to the presence of a narcotic in the trunk of a person's car, and by happenstance it turns out that there IS a narcotic in the trunk of that person's car, should I stop and search your car the next time a Wiccan says you're riding dirty?
Edit: If any attorney on this thread makes it to the U.S. Supreme Court to argue a case some day, I will give that person $1,000 if they include the phrase "riding dirty" in their oral arguments.
Stipulations:
1. I must be present during those oral arguments.
2. You must provide bona fides that you are, in fact, a member of this forum.
3. I will give you an additional $500 if Clarence Thomas knows what that means and explains it to Scalia.
Sure, and I'm not saying that a cop can't have more than one thing leading to probable cause. Alls I'm saying is that if dogs don't give us accurate results maybe we should stop using them.
I don't think that's so crazy.
This is a terribad analogy. You cannot fine someone because the dog said so.
Probably the most important component of the system is that we try very, very hard to prevent probable cause being used in a racist way. There's quite a few types of tickets you can get while driving that aren't primary offenses, meaning that cops can't pull you over and ticket you for JUST that thing. Texting is a good example of this in some states. In those states, there's probably a pretty high incidence of people texting while driving and not getting pulled over for it.
Now, texting while driving is bad and should be stopped. But if you give cops the ability to pull over at their discretion for this particular offense based on their innate bias, you see a much higher rate of minorities being pulled over and ticketed. This isn't a fair application of the law. It's not that ticketing people for unsafe driving is a bad thing, it's that being able to stop someone and check them for rules that might be broken is no good because it leads to too much law enforcement in daily life, and without checks it has a higher impact on minorities.
The drug dog problem faces the same thing. Setting aside that some people will disagree with the war on drugs entirely, EVERYONE should be able to agree that selectively enforcing a particular law primarily against minorities is a problem. Because of the way we structure probable cause laws, there are far more offenders than we catch. But selectively granting additional searches due to drug dog probably cause results in more enforcement against minorities, and that's just a big no no. It's far better to always design the system so that particular problem doesn't arise.
What a cop can do is impound a car, tear the upholstery out, and then charge the owner a few hundred dollars in impound fees to get the car back.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The ticket analogy does not work, as the red light camera and parking meter are both uses as evidence (the sole evidence actually) to support the fine, where as the sniff is not evidence at all. It is only used as part of the determination of whether a search which finds actual evidence is itself lawful.
That won't stop me from trying to clear up a few things. Although it doesn't seem to have come up here, I still want to point out first that the CU case never said anything about corporations being people. Nothing at all. U.S. Code Title 1 Chapter 1 pretty clearly says that person = corporation, but nothing in the CU case anything to do with that, and the decision was pretty clear that whether or not corporations are people wasn't relevant.
What has come up here is the "money = speech" thing. That was briefly touched on in the CU decision, but it is a long-standing and well-supported legal principle. And it's often over-generalized. It isn't that giving money is the same thing as speaking. The point is that regulating money as a proxy for censorship is the same thing as censorship. For example, a law banning actors from being paid for any work done in a movie that depicts homosexuality... such a law might be argued as only about money, and doesn't ban or censor anything. Except of course it does. It's using money regulation as a proxy for censorship. Be honest about what's going on.
Obviously no one ever ruled that spending money has carte blanche protection under the First. All sorts of financial transactions are regulated and/or banned. There is no over-arching principal whatsoever that money = speech unless speech is already what the issue is actually about.
And so then there's slipperly slope argument:
Not sure if anyone was paying attention, but the CU case was about the Federal government banning a movie. That is what makes it at least up for discussion as a First Amendment concern. The federal government banned a movie during election season because they were concerned that the movie was spreading politics that are bad for America... you could not more perfectly describe the exact thing that the First Amendment was written to prevent. The exact thing, the very first thing, that was added to the Constitution that the people wanted to make sure the government wasn't allowed to do.
It's my job (my right) to decide if I want to listen or agree. You could spend 41 hojillion dollars on laser-beam messages on the moon and it wouldn't have gotten me to vote for Romney. It wouldn't even have gotten me to read the message in the first place. But that was all on me.
This is the element of free speech that everyone seems so willing to assume and gloss over: that the people will listen to and agree with whatever is put in front of them, and thus it is up to the government to make sure they only hear messages that are politically proper. If a corporation can advertise for a candidate, well then that candidate is naturally going to win, because everyone will blindly believe and agree. And corporations are inherently evil and bad for us. Now, not only is there a lot of evidence that it actually doesn't work this way, but the very idea of it is wholly contradictory to free speech to begin with. If you don't trust your fellow humans to think critically about what they see and hear, to seek out more information on what they are interested in and ignore messages they aren't, then free speech is not a political ideal you support. The middle is excluded; it's one or the other. So long as you claim to believe that free speech is important to a healthy society, then you are saying that you trust your fellow humans to make informed decisions about any political message they might see and hear (more so than not, anyway), and that it isn't up to you to decide what politics will be "bad" if they are allowed to think about them.
It is far, far less clear that giving money to a candidate has anything to do with someone's right to freedom of speech. If the federal government isn't banning a movie, then there doesn't seem to be such an obvious problem with telling a person or a corporation or a candidate that they can't engage in a transaction of a certain nature. So I really don't see the slope as all that slippery. I'm pretty sure that donations will remain regulated.
As for drug dogs, I think that is kinda like the lie detector. It works, except not the way people thinks it does. It works because the suspect believes it works, and is thus intimidated into self-incrimination. I don't know that much about drug dogs but I imagine this is why people support their use even if they aren't that accurate all the time. My view is that if we didn't have such a hard-on for drug enforcement (or, alternatively, such a distaste for it) to begin with, this wouldn't be as much of an issue. No one is going to rush to the defense of a terrorist whose bomb was sniffed by a bomb-sniffing dog that didn't have his paperwork up to code.
The ultimate goal here is to prevent communities and the authorities in those communities from becoming accustomed to frequent and unjustified searches and seizures, not without real good reason (like bombs), because otherwise it becomes all too easy for political sway to suddenly turn "drug dogs" into "thought criminal dogs" or "border enforcement dogs" or "sexual deviancy detecting dogs" or whatever. As such, I'm thinking it probably is important that we are very clear about what is or isn't ok when it comes to dogs. If the paperwork isn't there, then let's not be lax about it.
If the police department trains, certifies and regularly employees witches, and they are standard practice in the whole country, then I would be ok with saying that their assessment can contribute to finding probable cause, where reasonable. Just to say it, something being a standard part of the police arsenal across the entire nation argues pretty strongly in favor of it being a reasonable police method, imo.
Pack it up folks, we're done here.
This is not a person wanting to have a serious discussion.
Much in the same way that Dred Scott was about a farmer retrieving his legal property.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
...So...this is some crazy fucking weather we've been having on the East Coast lately, huh?
Yeah, pretty much.
The only sane response to the quoted text is "Ha ha. No."
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The problem here is that the source of error comes from the LEO not from the dog. Dogs, as far as i know, aren't racist. This is why i asked for numbers of successful searches outside of dog use.
As an asinine example; we search people every day because they want to board an air plane. The success rate on that is about a close to zero as you can get with out actually hitting it. Obviously, a low success rate is not enough of a reason to stop searches.
Consequentialist, Ends-Justify-Means, v bad.
I mean, if racial profiling stops terrorism then...
FYI, I consider myself a consequentialist.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
No, not in that way at all. I think the Agree buttons have turned P-A into snarky quiptown.
Meh, that question isn't really relevant to the dog question.
If it turns out that dogs are more accurate than other methods, it's still conceivable that this is because other methods are simply even more egregiously inaccurate.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Right except that supplies to cook meth aren't meth itself. The dog wasn't correct.
Not that I want to give the impression that I'm supporting the TSA, but that's an indiscriminate search, at least. I think we'd get a whoooooole lot madder, faster, if the TSA mostly only grabbed the latinos to go through the backscatter.
As I said, the government didn't like the politics of a message and banned it. If that isn't First Amendment, there isn't a First Amendment.
Unfortunately, math (statistics in particular) and the scientific method argues even more strongly against it.
All I was trying to say is that reasonableness is, for lack of a better word, a pretty reasonable standard to adopt in assessing whether the police should rely on something. The idea of using a witch to find drugs is pretty silly, but then the police don't routinely engage in the use of them. I think that the fact that our entire nation's police forces (including federal police) use drug sniffing dogs is pretty clear evidence that it is currently reasonable to use them as a method for investigating drug crimes. You can have objections, and that is fine, and it may be that we should reevaluate the method, but until we do so, saying that a pillar of standard police work which the supreme court just upheld is unreasonable in all circumstances is a bold claim.
No, we don't have "objections".
What we have is statistical proof, both from analysis of real world data and from scientific study, that the core aspect of the legitimacy of the use of drug dogs - that the results that they return are based purely on the physical scene alone - is severely questionable at best. Compared to that, the argument of consensus pales to be meaningless. Furthermore, your consensus argument is further weakened by the fact that the group reaching consensus is not impartial to the argument.
The man appeared to be on drugs to the police officer. The dog may well have smelled drugs that had been in the car in the past, or maybe the guy smelled like meth because he cooks it without proper ventilation. If the officer has PC to suspect that someone has drugs and finds a gun, the gun is not off limits as evidence. Again, the standard SCOTUS has adopted is reasonableness, so this is not open season on searches just by bringing a dog anywhere in the world and waiting for it to signal.
The study Feral cited did not conclude that we should stop using the dogs, or that they can't be effective. It concluded that we should do further research and use that to cut down on behavioral cues. Maybe that will become part of the determination of when it is reasonable to rely on a dog's sniff. All that SCOTUS did was reject a post facto list of criteria that a dog must satisfy in order for it's sniff to be part of probable cause.
Edit: From Feral's link:
I mean, the thing was still a political ad, and that kind of thing needs to be regulated. I mean we just had a judge in Ohio convicted this week, and Jesse Jackson Jr. pled guilty today because wooo public corruption. But they went far beyond what the actual case was about and sold the country even further to the donor class. Which is why we're currently obsessed with debt and not 8 fucking percent unemployment.
Meanwhile, SCOTUS is like 50/50 to take down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which will be this court's second entree in the five worst SCOTUS decisions ever.
I'm sure anyone who has left grade school could understand that.
You're not being serious.
People should stop replying to you. I know I am.
Whether we should make changes in their use is a different question from if we should consider investigations carried out in compliance with standard police procedures as reasonable until a change is made.
Jesus, it's that fucking simple. If you're ok with letting the police search at will based on their gut instinct without further need for probable cause, then yes, the dog is a great way to manufacture it.