Florida v. Harris Case Brief Summary | Law Case Explained

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Florida v. Harris | 133 S.Ct. 1050 (2013)
In Florida versus Harris, the United States Supreme Court took a break from its usual fare to answer the pressing question, who’s a good dog?
Aldo the German shepherd had completed a one-hundred-twenty-hour training course in drug detection in which he was taught to alert when he smelled drugs in a particular location. He was certified by a drug-dog-testing company called Drug Beat.
Aldo teamed up with K-Nine officer William Wheetley. They did a forty-hour refresher course together, and got to work sniffing out crime. To keep their skills sharp, Aldo and Wheetley practiced finding drugs for four hours every week.
Aldo and Wheetley were out on routine patrol when Wheetley stopped Clayton Harris for driving
with an expired license plate. Harris had an open can of beer in his cup holder and was visibly nervous. Harris refused to allow Wheetley to search the vehicle. Wheetley walked Aldo around the truck for a free air sniff. Aldo alerted at the driver’s side door.
Based on Aldo’s alert, Wheetley concluded he had probable cause to search Harris’s truck. He found pseudoephedrine pills, hydrochloric acid, antifreeze, and iodine crystals. Wheetley arrested Harris, who admitted he regularly cooked and consumed methamphetamine.
In what must have felt like astonishing bad luck, Wheetley and Aldo stopped Harris again when he was out on bail. Aldo again alerted at the driver’s side door, but this time Wheetley found nothing of interest in the truck.
At trial, Harris asked the court to suppress the evidence from his truck on the ground that Aldo’s alert hadn’t given Wheetley probable cause for a search. He argued that Aldo had alerted when no drugs were present in the vehicle, and that Wheetley didn’t have complete records of Aldo’s performance in the field, including data on false positives. The trial court denied the motion.
The Florida Supreme Court held that because a dog’s reliability is key to establishing that its alert creates probable cause, the state had to present a drug dog’s field-performance records, including false-positive alerts, and any other evidence about the dog’s reliability. It reversed. The United States Supreme Court granted cert.
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[@NathanielIReiff]

Important to note that Aldo was not trained to sniff out those chemicals. Cases like this reiterate why I think the Supreme Court needs to embrace a sniff-plus test: meaning a dog sniff is a circumstance not one in-and-of-itself to substantiate probable cause.

[@haddieschell1475]

thank u i used this for an ap gov project i love u