The stupid. It burns.

I haven't posted anything since January, there hasn't been anything sufficiently surprising to amaze me or sufficiently stupid to gain my ire. Until now.

The Idaho Supreme Court has vacated a Mountain Home man's conviction for felony drug possession and delivery after it ruled that a police drug-sniffing dog trespassed and conducted an illegal search by putting its paws on his vehicle, prompting the search that led to his arrest.

The court issued its decision Monday, with three of the five justices in agreement and two dissenting.

The case centered on the 2019 arrest of Kirby Dorff. According to court documents, the officer said Dorff was stopped by a patrol officer in Mountain Home after Dorff drove across lanes of traffic without using a signal. A second officer arrived with a police K-9 named Nero who was trained to detect illegal drugs.

While Dorff explained to the first officer that he didn't have a valid driver's license or proof of insurance in the vehicle, Nero began sniffing around the car. Police body camera footage showed the dog jumped up against the car multiple times, including once when his paws rested on the driver's side door and window as he sniffed the "upper seams" of the car, officials said.

Oh noes, the dog put his front feet on the car! Like dogs never do that.

The legal opinion:

 Justice Robyn Brody in the majority opinion wrote that justices weighed whether the dog's intrusion on the exterior of Dorff's vehicle constituted trespassing as it would have if the dog had entered the interior of the vehicle.

Ultimately, Brody wrote, she and justices John Stegner and Colleen Zahn agreed that the exterior of the vehicle is protected by the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches. They said the drug-sniffing dog "intermeddled" with Dorff's personal effects by jumping up on the car.

"Intermeddling is the difference between someone who brushes up against your purse while walking by and someone who, without privilege or consent, rests their hand on your purse or puts their fingers into your purse before your eyes or behind your back," Brody wrote.

According to the majority opinion, it doesn't matter that the unlawful search included the exterior of Dorff's property or was performed by a drug-sniffing dog.

The dissent:

 Bevans in a separate opinion reiterated his view from an earlier case that a drug-sniffing dogs canine instincts aren't the same as intentional police intrusion.

For justices to equate a drug-sniffing dog "instinctually jumping onto the exterior of a car" to a government agent placing a tracking device on a vehicle "stretches logic beyond the breaking point of reasonableness," Bevans wrote.

The dissent, unsurprisingly, is a longer version of what I said. Dogs jump up on shit when they're excited. That's how they are.

The real issue, apparent from the utter stupidity of the majority opinion and the fact that the news article doesn't mention it, is that the Court does not want police to have drug-sniffing dogs present at traffic stops. Or possibly to have them at all. Because politics, at some level or other, has created two opposing factions. One faction represented by the majority opinion, one by the dissent.

The problem with letting courts decide things is that they invent stuff like this to disguise that they're really doing something else. Somebody doesn't want Idaho police to have dogs, or they want less drug dealers in jail, or they just want to fuck over Idaho by letting criminals have a free hand. But they can't get the votes to do it in the legislature. So they get their bros onto the court, and they do it that way.

Oh and Mr. Dorff got booked again in February 2023. Going by his picture he's a real pillar of the community.