ABSTRACT
As with other searches, a seizure of currency for a dog sniff can reach a point of being unreasonably long. A case arising in California in 1994 concerned a passenger who claimed $191,910 he was carrying was for buying gems. On boarding a plane in San Diego, he had told a baggage scanner that the sheets inside his luggage were pamphlets, but she could see they were bills and noti ed the San Diego Harbor Police. The passenger told the police he was a gemologist. The ¬ight departed for Oakland, California, along with the luggage, and the San Diego police noti ed the San Francisco International Airport Drug Task Force, where agents tried to get a narcotics dog to meet them at the ¬ight’s arrival in Oakland. The dog did not arrive but the passenger permitted the agents to search his luggage, where they saw the currency. The agents told the passenger they would hold his bags for a dog sniff and gave him a receipt. Two hours later a sniff was conducted at the Oakland airport and the dog alerted. The Ninth Circuit agreed with the district court that the detention was too long, providing a hypothetical:
[I]f an unforeseeable canine virus suddenly af¬icted all of the drug-snif ng dogs in Hawaii, leaving them out of commission for a 24-hour period, government agents in Hawaii would not be justi ed in detaining a traveller’s bags for the entire period on a mere reasonable suspicion. Regardless of the government’s good faith and exercise of due care, the Fourth Amendment would not allow such an extensive impingement of the traveller’s liberty without probable cause.
