If you’ve been following the news, you may be aware that the Illinois Supreme Court (ILSC) issued a decision last week in People v. Redmond, 2024 IL 129201. In case you aren’t, the ILSC just ruled that the odor of burnt cannabis (unless there’s some other factor) does not provide probable cause for a search. Not only that, paragraph 54 makes it clear that this applies to any search conducted after 1/1/2020. At the time of this post, the ILSC has not yet issued its decision in the companion Molina case, which dealt with the odor of raw cannabis.
What does this have to do with the title of this post? Well, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has repeatedly held that canine alerts could provide probable cause to search, as long as the State can show that the animal and the alert are reliable. They do this by showing that the dog will only alert to those items which no individual has any right to possess, and will not alert to things like beef jerky or cigarettes. However, now that the ILSC has found that the odor of burnt cannabis does not justify a search, law enforcement is about to have a big problem.
You see, drug detection animals are trained to alert to a wide variety of substances which were illegal when they were trained. In Illinois, to my knowledge, they’ve all been trained to alert to the odor of burnt cannabis. Moreover, drug dogs are not trained to give different alerts for different substances. This means that, since January of 2020, every dog alert has been unreliable because it was just as likely to indicate burnt cannabis (which does not justify a search) as it was contraband.
What does this mean? In the short term, it means that a lot of lower court judges are going to try to find ways to get around the clear ruling in Redmond. In the long term, it may well mean that police have to retire a generation of drug detection animals and start over. Of course, as that requires them to addict a new generation of animals to the drugs they’re supposed to detect, it also provides an opportunity to stop abusing animals altogether.