MIDSTATE POLICE APPLAUD RULING ON POLICE DOG SEARCHES

WARNER ROBINS -- Middle Georgia law enforcement officers hailed as good
news Monday a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allows police dogs to sniff
the outside of a vehicle for drugs without probable cause when a motorist
is pulled over for a traffic violation.

But police say the decision will not impact how they enforce the law
because they were already acting under a previous U.S. Supreme Court
decision that allows a drug dog to check out a vehicle from the outside in
the regular course of a traffic stop.

Warner Robins Police Chief Brett Evans explained that the previous ruling
allows the canine drug check - as long as the motorist is not detained any
longer than he or she would be normally for the traffic stop.

If the dog alerts to the possibility of drugs, then that gives police
probable cause to search the interior of the vehicle, he said.

While law enforcement was delighted with Monday's ruling, the American
Civil Liberties Union of Illinois, where the case originated, is disappointed.

Debbie Seagraves, executive director for the ACLU of Georgia, said Monday
she had not had an opportunity to the review the ruling and declined comment.

"As Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg noted in her dissent, the use of these
dogs changes the character and nature of the traffic stop from a simple
interaction between police officer and citizen to a menacing experience in
which many individuals feel threatened," a news release on the national
ACLU's Web site says.

But Monroe County Sheriff John Cary Bittick, who chairs the congressional
affairs committee for the National Sheriff's Association, says he disagrees
that there is such an encounter.

He said most reasonable people when stopped wouldn't object to a drug dog
being walked around a vehicle unless he or she had something to hide.

In the Illinois case, Roy Caballes was stopped for driving six miles over
the speed limit on Interstate 80, according to the Associated Press.

He appeared nervous to the trooper who pulled him over, so a police dog was
walked around the vehicle. The dog indicated there were drugs in the
vehicle and the vehicle was subsequently searched - a search that produced
$250,000 worth of marijuana.

Caballes challenged the search, saying it violated the Fourth Amendment,
which protects citizens from unreasonable search and seizures without
probable cause. But in the Supreme Court ruling, Justice John Paul Stevens
found that the intrusion of privacy from the police dog walking around a
vehicle was minimal for motorists who have been lawfully stopped for a
traffic violation, according to the AP.