THE RISE OF THE 'SOPHISTICATED' POLICE-DOG SNIFF

The battle over $38,480 seized from Bradford
Nalou pitted the word of the Detroit-area
businessman against the nose of Bruno, a Nebraska police dog.

In May 2009, the Nebraska State Patrol pulled
over Mr. Nalou for speeding. A search of his car
found the cash, which Mr. Nalou said was
legitimately earned from his family-owned liquor
store and money-transfer business. He was
carrying it for a possible Las Vegas gambling trip, he said.

However, when Bruno was brought in to sniff the
cash, the dog "alerted" to the taint of illegal
drugs, federal authorities say. The police seized
the money as being connected to a crime.

Seizures like these occur routinely on the
nation's highways as part of the war on drugs,
say forfeiture attorneys and law-enforcement
officials. In many cases, such as Mr. Nalou's, an
individual doesn't have to be charged with a
crime to see his assets forfeited to the federal
government, if officials can persuade a court
that the asset itself is tied to illegal activity.

When suspicious cash is found, authorities often
call in dogs that are trained to respond to the
presence of illegal drugs. Federal statistics
show there are well over 1,000 drug-related
seizures per year, though it isn't known how many involve cash and dogs.

The reliability of "dog sniffs," long used in
law-enforcement investigations, has been a topic
of hot dispute. By the 1990s, courts were
expressing doubts about the validity of searches
that relied on dog-sniffs in the face of studies
showing that up to 90% of all currency in
circulation carried microscopic amounts of cocaine.

A 1996, a federal appellate-court decision called
a dog alert on money "virtually meaningless,"
given the "extremely high percentage" of
drug-tainted cash. A 1997 court decision said,
"Even the government admits that no one can place
much stock in the results of dog sniffs."

Scientific research came to the aid of law
enforcement. Researchers concluded that dogs
don't react to the cocaine itself, but to the
odor of a chemical, methyl benzoate, given off by
the drug. While cocaine traces might remain on a
bill indefinitely, the methyl benzoate odor
likely won't last more than a few weeks, said
Janet Dooley, a trainer at Dogs Finding Drugs in Catonsville, Md.

The upshot: If a dog is properly trained to react
just to methyl benzoate, "there is a high
likelihood" that at least some of the money had
recent contact with drugs, said Dr. Kenneth
Furton, a professor of forensic chemistry at
Florida International University and a prominent
researcher in the field. While a dog's reaction
still doesn't prove the money's owner was
involved in drug trafficking, it "can be used as
one piece of evidence," he said.

However, according to Dr. Furton, the dog should
be trained to react to a relatively large
presence of methyl benzoate, to protect against
the possibility of a false alert to what is
merely some incidental presence of drug residue.
Dr. Furton says that there has been a school of
training that uses relatively small amounts of
cocaine to improve the dog's sensitivitya=80=94but he
worries this could create more false alerts.

Dr. Furton says that in the late 1990s there was
a wide variety in the quality of dog training.
Since then there is been more of an effort by law
enforcement to establish uniform standards for
dog-training, a process some in the field refer
to as the "sophisticated dog sniff."

A 2001 appellate-court decision upheld a $30,000
forfeiture based partly on a "sophisticated dog
sniff" by a canine deemed properly trained to
alert to methyl benzoate. A 2005 appeals court
decision said that judges had "moved away from
unquestioning acceptance of the currency contamination theory."

However, also in 2005, then Supreme Court Justice
David Souter wrote that "the infallible doga=80|is
a creature of legal fiction," adding that out of
hundreds of drug-related searches a dog "will be wrong dozens of times."

After battling in court filings over the
reliability of Bruno's sniff, Mr. Nalou and the
Justice Department settled their dispute this
month. Mr. Nalou got back more than 70% of his
money; the rest was forfeited to the government.

After two years, "my client wanted the cases
resolved," said Denise Frost, Mr. Nalou's
attorney. A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment.