The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear two Florida cases at the end of October regarding dog sniffs and the Fourth Amendment. The Florida Supreme Court ruled in Florida v. Jardines that taking a drug detection dog to the front porch of a home to sniff for marijuana violated the Fourth Amendment. They held in Florida v. Harris, where a drug detection dog alerted to a car, that the dog sniff did not constitute probable cause to search a car.
The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) recently held a panel discussion on the cases which you can view online. Among the participants in the panel were a defense attorney and dog sniff expert, the Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and a Supreme Court litigator and partner at WilmerHale. You can watch the video here. News articles on the cases can be found here and here.
You can get also get more information about these cases from Shea Denning’s posts on the UNC School of Government blog. She has posted about the status of dog sniffs under the Fourth Amendment here and on NC dog sniff cases here.