by Phillip Smith
Police officers in Chesapeake, Virginia, have developed the ability to smell marijuana in cars as they cruise down the highway, even when the police have their windows up. Or, at least, according to a report in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot this week, that's what they are claiming.
"We drive our patrol car with the vents on, pulling air from the outside in, directly into our faces," Officer Barrett Ring said late last year in court during a preliminary hearing, according to a transcript of the proceedings. "Commonly, we'll be behind vehicles that somebody in the vehicle is smoking marijuana, and we can smell it clear as day."
Smelling the odor of marijuana would create probable cause to stop and search a vehicle. Ring said police would follow a car until there were no other cars in the area so they could make sure it was indeed that vehicle from which the odor of weed was emanating.
Defense attorneys and civil libertarians are pronouncing themselves mind-boggled by the claim.
"The idea that police can drive behind a car and smell marijuana is preposterous," said Assistant Public Defender Matthew Taylor. "What do we need drug dogs for if (police) can drive behind cars and smell marijuana?"
The police were claiming powers verging on the "supernatural," he said.
"It stretches the imagination that the police can drive down the road and home in on a car," agreed ACLU of Virginia executive director Kent Willis.
Willis said that traffic stops based solely on an officer's sniffing from a police car will draw legal challenges. "Experts will have to tangle over this and decide," he predicted.
So far, no cases have been thrown out, although Taylor tried unsuccessfully to make that happen in a recent case. In that case, police claimed they smelled marijuana in a vehicle while driving down the highway and pulled it over. But the issue of their amazing olfactory abilities wasn't addressed by the court because police also said they smelled marijuana when they approached the vehicle on foot.
Other area defense attorneys who had cases where police made similar claims said they had not challenged the searches because police had reasons to conduct the traffic stops.
The practice is apparently limited to Chesapeake Police, according to the Virginian-Pilot's survey of local law enforcement agencies. Suffolk County prosecutor Phillips Ferguson said he hadn't heard of the practice, but it expected it to catch on.
"It's very creative policing," he said, but added that if police were using the moving automobile sniff as their as their sole basis for making a traffic stop, that might be successfully challenged. "I'm not saying they wouldn't have been justified in stopping the car, but it's pushing the line," Ferguson said.
Instead, he recommended that if police smell the odor of marijuana coming from a passing vehicle on the road, they find some other pretext to pull it over.
Public defender Taylor said he challenged the vehicle search in his case because he wanted to challenge the validity of the technique. "If cops can get away with this, they will have total authority," he said.
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It's actually pretty easy to smell someone smoking something in the car in front of you, if they have their windows down. But, I guess reason and logic don't help when writing obliviously moronic cop-hating articles. The point isn't that cannabis can be detected by it's strong odor...
The point is that the smell becomes impossible to hone in on when the wind has dispersed it out the window.
It could be coming from anywhere.
It also doesn't seem highly effective peace officer tactics to tail a car for as long as it takes for it to be the only vehicle on the road.
How far behind are they tailing? How windy is it? How fast is the vehicle travelling?
All of these things play a part in whether someone would not only be able to detect the odor of cannabis...but from where EXACTLY it may be coming.
This is bs, they are just trying to vaildate their illegal stops..This site contains copyrighted material the use of which in some cases has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Such material is made available for the purposes of news reporting, education, research, comment, and criticism, which constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (found at the U.S. Copyright Office) and other applicable intellectual property laws. It is our policy to remove material from public view that we believe in good faith to be copyrighted material that has been illegally copied and distributed by any of our members or users.
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