TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court ruled police officers can tell a driver they pulled over to get out of their vehicle so a K-9 can conduct a drug search.
This doesn’t violate the driver’s Fourth Amendment rights that protect citizens against unreasonable search and seizures, according to the ruling on Thursday.
It was already settled that a driver can be ordered out of the car after being lawfully stopped for a violation but the question to Florida’s highest court was whether this rule applied to a K-9 officer who arrived midway through the stop to perform a sweep.
This question stemmed from a 2018 incident where an undercover Tampa police officer saw Joshua Creller cut through a gas station parking lot to avoid a red light. The officer followed Creller’s truck for several blocks and radioed a marked car with sirens and lights to initiate the traffic stop.
The two officers asked if they could search the truck, and Creller said no, which is why a K-9 unit was called. The K-9 officer asked for permission to search the vehicle to which Creller said no again, according to the Supreme Court opinion.
The officer told Creller to exit the truck for his safety and the dog’s safety since Creller was still in control of the truck. Creller was forcefully removed after not complying with law enforcement and charged with resisting an officer without violence when he refused to comply with a K-9 officer’s command to exit his car.
After law enforcement searched the car, they found methamphetamine and he was charged with a third-degree felony of possession of a controlled substance, according to Hillsborough County court records.
The trial court convicted Creller of the charges and held that the drug-sniffing sweep was not a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.
The Second District Court of Appeal held Creller was unlawfully seized because there was no probable cause for the K-9 to search the truck. This conflicted with a 2017 ruling from the Fifth District Court of Appeal.
While the court ultimately ruled 5-1 that Creller’s rights were not violated, Justice Jorge Labarga dissented. He cited a U.S. Supreme Court ruling from 1997 that held the use of a K-9 sweep after a stop without reasonable suspicion violated the Fourth Amendment.
“The forced removal of a driver from the vehicle before probable cause of the existence of contraband has been established—and without any evidence that such seizure is necessary to ensure officer safety during issuance of a traffic citation—constitutes an unreasonable seizure without any justification under the Fourth Amendment,” he wrote.
Justice Renatha Francis, who wrote the opinion, said that case doesn’t apply because the traffic stop was ongoing since a traffic citation wasn’t issued before the K-9 unit arrived.
