WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police may not drag out a routine traffic stop to buy time for a dog to search the vehicle for drugs.
“A police stop exceeding the time needed to handle the matter for which the stop was made violates the Constitution’s shield against unreasonable seizures,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, adding that authority for stopping the vehicle “ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed.”
The court’s decision in Rodriguez vs. United States was 6-3, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan joining Ginsburg in the majority.
The Supreme Court in 2005 said that a dog sniff conducted during a lawful traffic stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment, a case in which Ginsburg dissented. But she said the “line drawn” in that decision was that the dog sniff could not prolong the traffic stop.
