The dog sniff at the center of a Supreme Court petition

The traffic stop started with a dirty license plate. Logan Camp, a police officer in Winterset, Iowa, pulled over Ashlee Mumford on March 5, 2022, because he couldn’t make out two of the numbers on her plate.

But once he stopped Mumford’s car, Camp investigated more than her license, registration, insurance, and plate. He called in the police department’s canine handler and asked Mumford and her passenger to get out of the vehicle.

The handler, Christian Dekker, soon arrived with Orozco, a certified drug-detection dog, and they walked around the exterior of Mumford’s car for 15 to 20 seconds. Along the passenger side, “Orozco briefly rose on his hind legs, put his paws on the passenger door, and his nose ‘momentarily, almost imperceptibly’ crossed the plane of the open window,” according to a Supreme Court brief filed by the state of Iowa in Mumford v. Iowa. The dog alerted Dekker to the presence of drugs, prompting a search of Mumford’s purse and car. Ultimately, Mumford was charged with possession of methamphetamine, marijuana, and drug paraphernalia and then convicted of marijuana and drug paraphernalia possession (but acquitted of possession of meth.)

But it didn’t end there. Orozco’s brief sniff inside the car that night soon could be at the center of a Supreme Court case and become part of the justices’ rich history of wrestling with the use of police dogs and their noses.

Since 2004, the court has considered at least three other cases on dog sniffs and the Fourth Amendment. In those cases, it held that police officers can use drug-detection dogs during traffic stops even if they don’t have reasonable suspicion that drugs are present, that officers can search the inside of a vehicle without a warrant if a dog signals from outside the vehicle that drugs are present, and that, in most cases, drug-detection dogs cannot be used at the front door of a private house without a warrant.    

Which brings us back to Mumford. In a cert petition filed in April, Mumford contended that when the dog’s nose entered the vehicle’s interior, it transformed a legal search into a Fourth Amendment violation. This was because she hadn’t consented to a search of the interior of her vehicle and because Orozco hadn’t indicated the presence of drugs while walking around the car’s exterior, the latter of which could have given officers a reasonable belief that drugs were present and therefore probable cause to allow the dog to sniff inside the car.

Mumford has now been fighting for years to suppress the evidence collected by police officers after Orozco’s nose poked into the open window, so far without success. In December, the Iowa Supreme Court affirmed a state trial court’s denial of her motion to suppress. The December ruling emphasized Dekker’s claim that Orozco’s sniff had been “instinctual” and that he had not ordered or encouraged the dog to stand and investigate the open window. The officers had probable cause to pull Mumford over and probable cause to search the car once Orozco alerted them to the drugs, even though the dog’s alert stemmed from an intrusion into the vehicle, the Iowa Supreme Court held. In its own words, “[t]he drug dog’s almost imperceptible entry into the open window of the vehicle cabin took place in the open air and did not go beyond the normal scope of a dog sniff.”

However, two judges dissented. One dissenting opinion said that officers had facilitated Orozco’s lean into the open window and then conducted an unlawful search, while the other warned that the majority had opened the door to “significant, distressing, and embarrassing” canine intrusions.

Mumford has asked the Supreme Court to review the Iowa Supreme Court’s ruling, which she said deepened a “circuit split” — that is, a division between two or more courts of appeals or state supreme courts on a legal question — over when a police dog’s sniff violates the Fourth Amendment. “Some courts, like the Idaho Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit, and the Ninth Circuit” generally hold that “there is no reasonable expectation of privacy” around a car’s exterior but that there is one for a car’s interior, according to the cert petition. Other courts, including the Iowa Supreme Court and several courts of appeals, have allowed police dogs to make “instinctual” entries – that is, sniffs not ordered or encouraged by officers – into a car’s interior during their exterior examination.

“Had Ashlee Mumford been pulled over in Idaho rather than Iowa, her suppression motion would have been decided differently. … That result flouts the nature of a federal constitutional right,” the cert petition contended.

Initially, Iowa waived its right to respond to Mumford’s petition. But the court requested a response in May, meaning that at least one justice was interested in reviewing the state’s arguments before the court considered whether to hear the case.

In its response, which was filed on Aug. 12, the state contended that “[e]very federal circuit and nearly every state high court follows the same rule: A police dog’s instinctual, non-facilitated, and momentary incursion during a lawful exterior sniff is neither a property trespass nor a … privacy invasion attributable to the officer.” “Idaho alone rejects the instinctual-entry doctrine,” Iowa’s brief asserted.

The state further argued that even if the officers did make a “Fourth Amendment mistake,” then it “was, at worst, reasonable” – reasonable enough that “the State would have a formidable argument that the evidence remains admissible under the good-faith exception.” This allows prosecutors to use evidence collected through what otherwise would have been deemed an unlawful search and seizure because officers reasonably believed they were acting lawfully.

The Supreme Court is set to consider these filings at its “long conference” on Sept. 29, a private meeting during which the justices address 1,000 to 2,000 petitions that piled up during their summer recess. As noted above, if the court takes up Mumford’s appeal, it would become at least the fourth case on dog sniffing and the Fourth Amendment in front of the justices since 2004. Several more such cases have been before state courts in recent years, which the Iowa Supreme Court noted in its ruling.

In other words, police dogs are prompting a reexamination of search-and-seizure standards across the country. The Supreme Court may soon build on its past rulings about when police dogs can be used and where they can go by taking up this case that comes down to a nose.