United States v. Sharp, No. 10-6127 (6th Cir. 2012)
Annotate this CaseAfter Sharp was arrested on an unrelated warrant, police seized 154 grams of methamphetamine, 10.5 grams of marijuana and drug paraphernalia found inside a shaving kit on the seat of his car. When a police dog and his officer-handler arrived, the driver’s window of Sharp’s car was down. The dog sniffed the exterior of the vehicle, stopped, walked to the driver’s door, and, without formally alerting to the presence of narcotics, jumped through the open window, went into the back seat, then back to the front and looked up or alerted on the front passenger seat. The handler asked the dog to “show me,” and, with his nose, the dog poked the shaving kit on the front seat. Sharp, sentenced to 360 months in prison, appealed denial of his motion to suppress. The Sixth Circuit affirmed. A dog’s sniff around the exterior of a car is not a search under the Fourth Amendment; the canine’s jump and subsequent sniff inside the vehicle was not a search in violation of the Fourth Amendment because the jump was instinctive and not the product of police encouragement
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