The Constitution has gone to the dogs! (No offense meant to Coco.)

Hey, I not only like dogs, I LOVE them. However, certain misguided animals are being used by their evil masters to destroy our constitutional rights:

…even if you are neither a lawyer nor a super-libertarian, you might wonder 1) how often this sort of thing happens, 2) how it came to be that police can get permission from a dog to rifle an innocent man’s belongings, and 3) whether that state of affairs is consistent with the Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against “unreasonable searches and seizures.” The answers, in brief, are 1) fruitless searches based on dog alerts happen a lot more often than commonly believed, 2) dogs acquired this authority with the blessing of credulous courts mesmerized by their superhuman olfactory talents, and 3) this dog license is hard to square with the Fourth Amendment, unless it is reasonable to trust every officer’s unsubstantiated claim about how an animal of undetermined reliability reacted to a person, a suitcase, a car, or a house.

All of these issues come together in two cases the U.S. Supreme Court heard a few weeks after Bob Burns was pulled over. Florida v. Harris raises the question of how a judge knows that a dog’s alert is reliable enough to justify a search. Florida v. Jardines asks whether police need a warrant to use a drug-sniffing dog at the doorstep of a home. These cases, which will be decided by this summer, give the Supreme Court an opportunity to reconsider its heretofore unshaken faith in dogs, or at least limit the damage caused by the amazing canine ability to transform hunches into probable cause.

Look, the Fourth Amendment says this:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Having a dog specifically trained to search for and find what they are already looking for sniff you, your possessions, your car, or your house is a search, and I would submit that anyone who says it is not a search is either out of touch with reality or overcome by totalitarian state worship. Any apparatchik judge who issues a warrant based upon an officer’s interpretations of what a dog thinks ought to be at least removed from the bench, and ought to consider himself lucky that the tradition of the founders isn’t still being followed or the dogs might take him for a asphalt-based turkey.

A dog can be made to do anything to please its master. If Coco thought I would give her a treat later for “telling” me to search a car, she would tell me to search a car.

This stuff is almost medieval. I can’t believe the law has gone along with it for so long.

Just another example of how the insane War On Drugs has corrupted not only the Constitution, but reality.