DRUG SENSE WEEKLY

Sniffing Out The Truth About Drug Dogs: An Interview With Rex Curry

By Stephen Young                               

Rex Curry: You are in luck because you are one of the first to learn that the court has asked for a response (this is also visible from the court's docket entry) and I have been told the court asked for transcripts.  This is peaking interest in the case. Of course, it is already AT the Supreme Court, the only question is whether the Court will "bite" at the dog case and decide to hear oral arguments and issue a written opinion.

Curry:	I developed the entire strategy from the beginning and argued

the original motion to suppress evidence and filed the original appeal that started the trek to the U.S.  Supreme Court. The victim of the drug dog talked with me last night about the case.

Curry:	Correct.  Drug-sniffing dog training, quality and testing varies

widely.

Curry:	It is difficult to measure or quantify the width of the

variation.  That is one reason why law enforcement does not desire to keep records about their dogs.  It prevents attorneys from examining the issue.  In a sense, one of the ideas in the court case is "If you law enforcement officers will not keep records, then we judges will make your lack of records YOUR problem when we judges evaluate the dogs in a motion to suppress evidence."

Curry:	Well, five is not a magic number.  And your question points up

the problem: Every dog is different.  Each must be evaluated individually and repeatedly, with records that are maintained to enable evaluation and to note changes.  For example, dogs age and dogs become ill.  That and other changes can cause a good dog to go bad at any time.  All of that plays into court cases and the reluctance of law enforcement to keep records on dog performance.  Usually an attorney can find out what specific drugs the dogs were trained to detect, but believe it or not, even those types of records can be difficult to acquire.  Once acquired, the records can be vague about the actual training procedures and performance.

Curry:	The state of science is not even able to answer your question

clearly at this time in the sense that scientists are not certain what the dog is smelling as compared with what you or I smell.  For example, dogs are sometimes trained using "pseudo" drugs that are not actual drugs.  Well, what if the dog is smelling something on pseudo drugs that is NOT always an illegal smell? What if the dog alerts to that smell, which is NOT an illegal component of the smell? That is a difficult question to answer, but could be aided with record keeping of the dog's performance in the field or "on the street." The world's oldest living medical marijuana patient also pointed out a problem with drug dogs.  He said "I was in the airport recently and a dog sniffed my bag and walked away.  I called to the handler and asked if the dog was trained for bombs or drugs, and the handler said 'for drugs.' So I told him to bring the dog back because I had marijuana in my bag." His medicine was in a bottle with a good cap, which can prevent air-flow, meaning that it can eliminate or reduce any actual particles in the air that the dog would smell.

Curry:	Oh that is easy.  You have to remember that there is a strong

incentive for law enforcement not to CARE whether the dogs are accurate.  The dogs can simply be props for lies, in that the dogs are there to overcome refusals to consent to search, and the dog provides law enforcement officers (LEOs) with the ability to say that an alert occurred even if there was no alert.  And here is another angle: some LEOs do not want a "drug dog," they want a "car dog," in that they want a dog that when shown a car will alert, as if to say "yes that is a car." For some LEOs the goal is to search whenever the LEO desires, period.  The dog is simply a ruse to do so. That is why the dogs are so popular.  Do not be confused with the idea that the idea that there are "problems with drug dogs." For some LEOs those are not problems at all.  And again, that is why some LEOs have no interest in maintaining records about their dogs.