Charlotte Criminal Lawyer Blog

Attorney J. Bradley Smith answering the question: “Can I be arrested without evidence against me?”

An important decision was handed down by the Supreme Court last week when the justices decided that police officers do not have the authority to stop and hold those who have already left a residence that they’ve come to search.

The case, about the limits of an officer’s ability to hold a possible suspect related to a search, was decided 6-3. Bailey v. U.S., forced the Court to consider the precedent set by an earlier case from 1981, Michigan v. Summers, which created the right for police officers to stop those in a residence while they are there to execute a search warrant. The Summers case allowed officers to temporarily hold those who were on the premises even if they did not have a specific reason to suspect them of having engaged in any illegal activities.

This idea of holding someone on the premises of a search was put to the test in the recent Bailey case which began in 2005. Officers in upstate New York stopped a man, Chunon Bailey, and attempted to hold him even though he was more than a mile away from the residence the officers had been sent to search. Officers who stopped the man found evidence that linked him to drugs and weapons later located in the house.

The Supreme Court heard the case and disagreed with prosecutors who argued the principle set forth in Summers ought to be extended to the facts of the present case. The justices instead decided that the distance, more than a mile away from the residence, was too great to give the police the power to hold someone they suspected of being connected to the house. Justice Kennedy said that the rationale for allowing such detentions disappears when suspects are so physically removed from the house in question.

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Attorney J. Bradley Smith answering the question: “Do I have to perform the field sobriety tests when I’m pulled over for DWI in NC?”

The U.S. Supreme Court recently issued a ruling that sides with police dogs after the Florida Supreme Court attempted to impose harsh standards on using drug-sniffing dogs to justify a car search.

The case involved a drug dog named Aldo who did his duty and alerted his handler that that there was possible contraband in a truck that had been detained during a traffic stop. When a search was performed the police failed to find any of the drugs that Aldo had been trained to locate. Instead, they discovered a variety of ingredients that were used to make meth. Aldo’s handler guessed that the dog might have been responding to meth residue on the door handles to the vehicle. Though Aldo was trained to detect meth itself, the dog did not have the ability to detect the individual components that were in the truck.

The Florida Supreme Court deemed the search unconstitutional, saying that prosecutors failed to show Aldo was reliable enough to prove that there was probable cause to search the truck. The Florida High Court said prosecutors should have introduced the dog’s training records and field performance reviews as well as other objective evidence that could demonstrate Aldo’s reliability.

The Supreme Court flatly rejected such a strict standard, voting unanimously to overrule the requirements imposed by the Florida Supreme Court. The justices decided that dog-sniffing evidence should be handled like all other evidence related to probable cause and defendants should be given the chance to challenge the reliability of a dog’s senses given the “totality of the circumstances.”

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