(Originally printed in Kansas Sheriff magazine, Fall, 2024; provided to KPOA with permission)

"Karma has no menu; you get served what you deserve.”
                                                                                    K.L. Slater

Late one evening in 2012, a Valley, Nebraska K-9 officer stopped for a traffic offense a Mercury Mountaineer driven by Dennys Rodriguez. At the end of the car stop, the officer asked Rodriguez for permission to walk the K-9 around the SUV. Rodriguez said no. Not deterred, the officer deployed his dog, and the dog alerted to the odor of controlled substances coming from the Mountaineer. During a subsequent search, a large amount of methamphetamine was found.

Rodriguez was charged in federal court where he attempted to suppress the search arguing that the officer did not have reasonable suspicion to continue the temporary detention for the dog sniff.

Following a hearing, the trial court held that under 8 th Circuit law the continued detention of drivers was “not constitutionally prohibited [as long as] they [the detentions] constitute only a de minimis intrusion.” Since the dog sniff only took about 8 extra minutes, the continued detention of Rodriguez without consent or reasonable suspicion was found “not of constitutional significance.” Rodriguez was convicted and sentenced to a lengthy period in prison. On appeal, the federal 8 th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction.

Since in 2012 other federal circuit courts did not recognize the so-called “de minimis” rule of detention, Rodriguez asked the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve the split among the lower courts. And, in 2015, the Big Court held that there was no such thing as a “de minimis” amount of time a driver can be held for a dog sniff. Without consent or reasonable suspicion of other criminal activity, drivers are to be released as soon as an officer has completed the car stop’s “mission.” That “mission” is the enforcement action arising from the original traffic offense.

The Big Court vacated the 8 th Circuit’s judgment, and the case was “remanded for further proceedings consistent with” the opinion. Rodriguez had won the battle, but he quickly learned that he had actually lost the war.

A few months later when Rodriguez appeared for the remand hearing in the 8 th Circuit, he confidently argued that because the Big Court had agreed with him that the car stop was a constitutional violation, then the Exclusionary Rule should be invoked to suppress from evidence the seized methamphetamine. In other words, the Court should let him go.

The government, however, reminded the appellate court that just four years earlier, in a different case, the Supreme Court had said about the Exclusionary Rule: “The Fourth Amendment protects the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, but is silent about how this right is to be enforced. To supplement the bare text, the U.S. Supreme Court has created the exclusionary rule, a deterrent sanction that bars the prosecution from introducing evidence obtained by way of the Fourth Amendment violation.”

“Exclusion [of evidence] is not a personal constitutional right, nor is it designed to redress the injury occasioned by an unconstitutional search. The rule’s sole purpose is to deter future Fourth Amendment violations. Where suppression fails to yield appreciable deterrence, exclusion is clearly unwarranted.”

“Responsible law-enforcement officers will take care to learn what is required of them under Fourth Amendment precedent and will conform their conduct to these rules. But by the same token, when binding appellate precedent specifically authorizes a particular police practice, well-trained officers will and should use that tool to fulfill their crime-detection and public-safety responsibilities. An officer who conducts a search in reliance on binding appellate precedent does no more than act as a reasonable officer would and should act under the circumstances. The deterrent effect of exclusion of evidence in such a case can only be to discourage the officer from doing his duty.”

So, what did all that mean? It meant that the K-9 officer was acting in good faith by following the 8 th Circuit’s “de minimis” law as it was on the day of the car stop. Since what the officer did was reasonable, then suppressing the methamphetamine would not and could not act as a deterrent to any police misconduct. Rodriguez was out of luck. He could not personally benefit from the Big Court’s 2015 change in the law that he had brought about.

Rodriguez had won big in the United States Supreme Court, but in the end, he went to prison anyway.

Additional reading see: United States v. Rodriguez, 575 U.S. 348 (2015)[Big Court decision]; U.S. v. Rodriguez, 799 F.3d 1222 (8 th Cir. 2015)[on remand decision]; and, Davis v. United States, 564 U.S. 229 (2011)[exclusionary rule].