Hernandez v. Boles, No. 18-6281 (6th Cir. 2020)
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At 11:53, Tennessee Highway Troopers stopped Hernandez for speeding and ran a warrant-check Hernandez and Betancourt, the front seat passenger and the car's owner. The check came back negative at 11:59. Troopers were denied consent to search the car. At 12:13, Troopers searched the names of all four occupants of the car through a more comprehensive database. A K-9 unit arrived at 12:17. The dog sniffed the outside of the car, alerting to the odor of drugs. The dog did not alert again when allowed into the car. After checking with their supervisor, Troopers manually searched the car and found re-encoded gift cards and suspected amphetamines. The car's occupants were arrested and held for months before all charges were dropped. They filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983.
The district court granted the Troopers qualified immunity on the car search based on caselaw existing at that time. A jury found that the car stop was not impermissibly prolonged. The Sixth Circuit affirmed. The plaintiffs have not met the high burden of showing that the verdict was unreasonable as a matter of law. A reasonable jury could have concluded that, because the dog's first search was not sufficiently thorough, it did not dissipate the probable cause justifying a second search. At the time, a reasonable officer would not have been on notice that the dog’s failure to alert again to the car's interior was the kind of new information that dissipated the probable cause provided by its initial alert.
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