Sometime in late 1980 I was representing a man found not guilty by reason of insanity for hacking at several people with a machete in a shopping mall. Each side had retained a psychiatrist for expert testimony on the issue of the level of security appropriate for the facility in which he would be placed. After becoming more and more annoyed with the direction of the prosecutor’s interrogation of his own expert, despite overruling most of my objections, the judge called both counsel into chambers.
Standing before the judge's desk, we both knew that at least one of us, perhaps both, was about to take some heat. This was obvious because the judge kept himself, and us, standing.
“Money talks, bullshit walks,” he said, looking first at me, then at my opponent.
For anyone not politically aware in 1980, the expression was coined by Angelo Erichetti, once Mayor of Camden, New Jersey, during his prosecution in the ABSCAM (a contraction of “Abdul scam”) case where FBI agents posed as employees of a non-existent sheikh and got various government officials, including Erichetti, to take money in exchange for favors. Erichetti was sentenced to eight years for his involvement.
We were in a courthouse in New Jersey, where Erichetti’s failings still created raw emotions in many politicians who felt his taint had spread to them, but neither the prosecutor nor I thought we were going to have a conversation about Angelo Erichetti or his colorful language.
“At least Ensminger’s expert doesn’t sound like he memorized his brief. Can your psychiatrist think for himself?”
The prosecutor cleared his throat. “Well, my brief probably reflects his thinking more than the other way around.”
“Even the legal terms? He doesn’t know what they mean, but he’s putting them in every chance he gets. If I needed legal advice, I’d ask one of you. On second thought, I wouldn’t.”
“Well, I had to describe the case to him,” the prosecutor continued searching for a way to leave the room. “I suppose I used my own terminology, which he picked up.”
The judge made a derisive snort, but he had cooled slightly. He looked at me again.
“Part of your job, if you’re representing your client, is to sell the expert to me, or the jury, but it’s just me here, unfortunately for both of you. Tell your guy to think for himself or I’m throwing him out. I’ll be out after I call my wife, which will probably not put me in a good mood. Make me happy, ---------.”
“Yes, your honor,” my opponent said.
The judge looked at me.
“Yes, your honor,” I chimed. I wasn’t sure if the same warning applied to me, since my witness had left the stand the day before and there had been no threat to exclude his testimony.
I lost the case, by which I mean that I was unsuccessful in moving my client from a maximum security ward in a mental hospital to a halfway house. Despite the interaction I’ve just described, the judge’s order made my expert sound like the weaker witness. Perhaps he was, in the judge’s opinion, but I thought then, and I think now, that the judge needed a way to reject my expert and accept the prosecutor’s. It meant he was not making the decision on his own and he didn't want to be responsible if my client came across another machete.
A recent case concerning a dog’s alert in Union Station, Chicago, included a scathing evaluation by the court of two experts. Counsel for individuals suspected of drug activities had not sold them to Judge Elaine E. Bucklo of the federal district court for Northern District of Illionois.
Incident at Union Station, Chicago
DEA Task Force Agent Officer Romano, searching the passenger manifest of a train scheduled to depart Chicago’s Union Station for Seattle on December 6, 2002, noticed that a passenger, Vincent Fallon, had purchased a one-way, first class ticket with cash less than 72 hours before departure, which fit a drug-courier profile.
Romano and another DEA agent, Officer Terry, approached Fallon’s compartment, identified themselves, said they were conducting a routine check, and asked if they could ask a few questions. Fallon complied. The officers asked if Fallon was carrying drugs, weapons, or large sums of money, to which he replied he was not. Romano noticed Fallon was sweating.
Fallon said that the backpack and briefcase in the compartment were his, and consented to a search of the backpack. Romano then reached into Fallon’s compartment and picked up the briefcase. “Finding it locked, he asked Mr. Fallon about its contents.” Fallon said he did not have a key to the briefcase and that he opened with a knife, but that it only contained personal effects. Thus, Romano attempted to open the briefcase very early in the encounter before probable cause could have been established.
On further questioning, Fallon said the briefcase contained about $50,000 in cash, with which he said he planned to purchase a house in Seattle. Romano told Fallon that the briefcase would be seized and Fallon himself detained and asked him to come back into the station where he was frisked, fingerprinted, and photographed. The interaction had developed into an investigatory stop. In a suppression hearing, it was found that a Miranda warning had not been given to Fallon 361 F.Supp.2d 757) (N.D. Ill. 2005).
It was later learned that neither the briefcase nor the money belonged to Fallon but rather to Nicolas Marrocco, who had given the briefcase to Fallon to deposit in a safe deposit box in Seattle. Marrocco, when later challenged to explain the source of the cash, was largely unable to do so. (Another stage of the case determined that Marrocco owned the funds, but the connection of the funds to drug trafficking had not then been established. 494 F.Supp.2d 960 (N.D. Ill 2007).)
Romano requested that a drug detection dog be brought to the station. Before the dog arrived, Romano used a knife to open the briefcase and saw that it contained bundles of cash. He closed it without removing its contents. What was the point of opening the briefcase at this stage, given that the dog would soon arrive and an alert would provide a sufficient reason for opening the case? The effect of opening the case could have been to move air inside the case to the outside, making it easier for the dog to detect the odor of drugs, though there is no evidence that this was why Romano did it. The issue should have been of concern to counsel for the claimants.
Chicago Police Canine Officer Richard King arrived at the station. “After a brief discussion with Officer Romano, during which Officer King observed the briefcase containing the money, Officer King left to retrieve his dog, ‘Deny.’” Viewing the potential target by the handler should not have been permitted. This informed King that the dog would be sniffing for currency and gave him a visual clue about the size and shape of the object that Deny would be given the chance to alert to in the next stage of the investigation. Knowing the size of the case gave King some idea of what sort of space would be necessary to hide the case, and where it could not be hidden, which raises the issue of cueing as to the subsequent sniff.
Romano hid the briefcase in the “roll call room,” which contained a counter top beneath which were storage cabinets with hinged doors. The briefcase was placed in one of the cabinets. Officer King and Deny then entered the room and King commanded Deny to search for drugs. Where was Romano at this point? One of the experts later suggested he was within sight of the dog. If so, third-party cueing is possible. Romano could have avoided this problem by having someone else hide the briefcase. Arguably, the dog should have been given a zero trial, as would be done in a scent lineup, by entering the room first before the briefcase was hidden in it.
It is not clear why Romano hid the briefcase. Some sniffs of packages and luggage have involved putting the item in a room or row of similar packages, including packages containing currency, but here the idea may have been to try to avoid cueing since King had seen the briefcase and knew something about its contents.
“Whether Deny went straight to the cabinet containing the briefcase or, instead, sniffed about the roll call room before proceeding to the cabinet is in dispute. But the evidence is uncontroverted that Deny ‘alerted’ to the cabinet door by scratching and pulling at it, then, after opening the cabinet door, alerted to the briefcase itself by scratching and biting it.”
Deny did not alert anywhere else in the roll call room. Counsel for the claimants argued that Deny did not go straight to the cabinet where he alerted, but the judge correctly noted that this was immaterial as a systematic search of the room before alerting did not indicate any failure on the canine team’s part. Ironically, counsel for the claimants might have made a stronger argument by suggesting that Deny went straight to the case because he was matching the odor of Romano, whom he had been near, to Romano’s scent on the briefcase, which Romano had tried to open and carried for a brief period. Thus, it could have been argued that the investigation had turned into a sort of tracking test or article search.
In challenging the canine evidence, the claimants seeking to avoid forfeiture of the cash argued that there were three genuine factual disputes regarding that evidence:
(1) Whether Deny was properly trained and certified to discriminate between innocently contaminated currency and currency that has been used in connection with a narcotics transaction.
(2) Whether Deny alerted to the odor of methyl benzoate or instead to the odor of circulated currency innocently contaminated with cocaine.
(3) Whether the methodology of the “sniff-search” in this case adequately protected against cross-contamination or the possibility of a false positive alert.
The court, in denying a previous motion for summary judgment by the government, had noted that the government admitted in its reply supporting that motion that "the dog sniff evidence is the sine qua non of its case...." The phrase "sine qua non" seems to suggest that the canine evidence here is more than corroborative, being almost the government's entire case. The court, while denying the government's motion at the time, did so with leave to file a renewed motion supported by expert evidence regarding the sniff, as well as challenging the claimants' expert evidence, which consisted of two canine experts. The court seemed to be showing the way that the government could win on motion, without having the canine evidence examined in a full trial, which is what has now happened.
Training and Certification
The court found it “undisputed” that the canine team had received 500 hours of training, including narcotics detection for marijuana, cocaine, heroin, ecstasy, and methamphetamine, and had been certified in 1998 and remained so until he retired in 2007. In pre-certification training, the pair conducted 116 sniff searches in which he alerted to the presence of drugs or money. In training sessions where currency was sniffed, Deny alerted to tainted currency but not untainted, circulated currency.
The court dismissed a challenge to the government’s evidence as follows:
“Claimants purport to dispute this evidence based on their expert, Mr. Kroyer's, own interpretation of the 'dog log.' … But Mr. Kroyer has no personal knowledge of that document, and his interpretation of it is insufficient to controvert the sworn testimony of Officer King, who created the log and participated in the events it records, and who affirmatively disputes Mr. Kroyer's interpretation. The evidence is thus undisputed that on three separate occasions during his training, Deny alerted to currency contaminated with narcotics but did not alert to untainted currency.”
The wording is a little curious in reaching the conclusion that the evidence was undisputed because the expert had no personal knowledge. A log book should be sufficiently understandable that "personal knowledge" would not be necessary to understand it. In any case, it would seem that there was in fact a dispute. It should be perhaps be noted here that where a dog fails to alert to currency, the currency will often not be tested for cocaine residue, meaning that a false negative could easily go undetected.
Field Records
The court states that after certification, Deny “performed approximately 309 sniff searches (in training and in the field) and gave 259 positive alerts. In fifty searches, Deny did not alert. Of Deny’s 259 positive, post-certification alerts, ninety-three were in training exercises. Eighty-two of these revealed hidden drugs, and ten revealed drug-scented currency.”
The numbers should have been explored more by counsel for the claimants. The dog had a nine-year working life, from 1998 to 2007. The average training time per month is probably around 16 hours (four hours/week), or about 192 hours per year, and 1,728 hours over a career of nine years. It would seem that with this much training (more or less), Deny should have only had the opportunity to alert to actual drug odor 93 times, about once a month. This is a very low number. Counsel for the claimants should have explored what amount of narcotics training was really going on.
The court then refers to the team’s statistics in the field:
“Deny also made 166 positive, post-certification alerts in the field, forty-five of which revealed narcotics. There is a dispute over whether Deny made 113 or 115 positive alerts to currency in the field, but this dispute is immaterial because even if Deny alerted 115 times to currency (as claimants contend), and even if every single one of these alerts was a false alert, it is nevertheless undisputed that drugs or currency known to be tainted with the scent of drugs was found after 137 of his 259 positive, post-certification alerts (ninety-two times in training and forty-five times in the field), making his reliability no less than 52.8%.”
The court’s approach was to look at all post-certification alerts, whether training or field alerts, and calculate the dog’s accuracy based on the finding of drugs and on alerts to currency known to be drug-tainted. If, instead, one were to look solely at field alerts which revealed narcotics, one would have 166 alerts resulting in the discovery of drugs in 45 instances. This would be an accuracy rating of 27.1%, excluding possible residual odor alerts. Instead, finding an accuracy rate of 52.8% (or 67.5% if pre-certification results are included), the court concluded that this was sufficient to meet the standard the Seventh Circuit set in U.S. v. Limares, 269 F.3d 704 (7th Cir. 2001).
Experts for the Claimants
It was mentioned above that the court rather dismissed Kroyer, an expert for the claimants, but it gets much worse for him:
“Furthermore, Deny's reliability is not materially challenged by claimants' putative experts. David Kroyer, a dog trainer whose esoteric credentials are summarily, and rather unhelpfully, described in the first paragraph of his short affidavit, … first suggests that Deny's certification by the Chicago Police Department is deficient, opining that it is 'normal' for dogs to be certified by outside agencies. Mr. Kroyer further opines that Deny's certification, or his handler's affidavit, should reflect which odors he is certified to detect, and the standards he is required to meet for certification…. Mr. Kroyer then opines that Deny's training was deficient. None of these opinions materially controverts the evidence of Deny's reliability, however, which is based not on his paper credentials, but on his actual performance in training and in the field…. Moreover, Mr. Kroyer's opinion that Deny was inadequately trained, is based on his own interpretation of the 'dog log,' a document of which, as noted above, Mr. Kroyer has no personal knowledge. In short, Mr. Kroyer's opinions relating to Deny's certification and training do not controvert the government's evidence of Deny's reliability.”
Putative experts? There is more “opining” here than I have ever seen in a single paragraph. The court reproduces Kroyer’s “unhelpfully described” “esoteric credentials” from his affidavit:
“Owner, President, Certified Training and Behavior Consultant, Master Trainer and Training Director of Canine Headquarters Police K9 division. Eleven years training experience. Placed green and finished K9 detection dogs for Law Enforcement, Military, and Homeland Security/Border Patrol. Trained and placed handlers for Law Enforcement, and Military. One Hundred percent (100%) passing rate under NNDDA certification. Conducted seminars and workshops nationally and internationally on detection dog training. Assisted in developing a program for mine detection rats at Bogota University, Columbia (sic).”
Certainly Kroyer needs a marketing consultant, and he should at least spell out National Narcotic Detector Dog Association, but I do not recall ever seeing such contempt for an expert.
Dr. Lawrence J. Myers of Auburn did not fare much better. The court quotes from Myers’ affidavit, which states that there “are no records of replicated, controlled, randomized, double-blind tests performed to determine reliability.” Moving on, the court then states:
“And Dr. Myers' opinion suffers from additional flaws that do not require expert rebuttal to perceive. For example, Dr. Myers suggests that Deny's ability to distinguish contaminated currency from general circulation currency—despite having been established on three separate occasions in Deny's pre-and post-certification training exercises—should be disregarded because ‘[t]here is no evidence of numerous non-alerts by the canine, Deny, to circulated U .S. currency.’ This suggests, of course, that some number of non-alerts to circulated currency would be enough to establish Deny's ability to distinguish between tainted and untainted currency. But if three times is not sufficiently ‘numerous,’ how many times would be? Ten? Fifty? One hundred? The Myers affidavit verily begs the question, but then proceeds to its conclusion that Deny's alert is unreliable without even the hint of a response. For the same reason, Dr. Myers' opinion regarding the need to ‘proof’ a detector dog off circulated currency—even were it not in conflict with the court's holding in Limares (reliability based on ‘how dogs perform in practice,’ not ‘how they were trained and “proofed off” currency’), … and based largely on the discredited ‘currency contamination theory’ (more on this below)—rings hollow on this record.”
The court is correct that an alert should not be rejected merely because there were not enough opportunities in a dog’s history to make false alerts, when there is no indication that false alerts would necessarily be made. Myers is correct, however, that a narcotics detection dog’s training should regularly involve proofing, such as using currency line-ups in which only some of the stations are tainted.
Myers then raises the possibility of cueing, which the court also dismisses:
“Nor does Dr. Myers' discussion of scientific studies involving ‘the potential for cuing’ by a detector dog's handler or other individuals raise a genuine dispute over the reliability of Deny's alert in this case. Whatever the validity of such studies, the only bases Dr. Myers cites for his opinion that this particular alert may have been a response to some ‘cue,’ rather than to Deny's detection of the scent of narcotics, are that ‘the handler knew and saw the object of the search,’ and that the officer who had hidden the briefcase was ‘visible in the doorway of the room in which it had been placed.’ There is no dispute, however, that Deny's handler, Officer King, did not know where the briefcase was hidden, and thus could not have ‘cued’ Deny to alert to the cabinet door. And, without any explanation of how Officer Romano might have ‘cued’ Deny from the next room (much less any evidence that the dog actually saw the officer), the mere possibility that Officer Romano may have been visible through the doorway is far too speculative a basis for concluding that Deny's alert was the result of the officer's improper influence, rather than the dog's detection of narcotics.”
Myers was right to raise the issue of cueing, as we did previously in our analysis. If King was visible in the doorway, the possibility of third-party cueing is high, and King already knew the size of the object that had been hidden in the room. As the authors have discussed in a paper on cueing posted on the website of the Animal Legal and Historical Information Center of Michigan State University, cueing by no means only comes from the handler’s knowledge. Anyone visible to the dog can make a motion that can cue a dog.
The court summarizes the opinions of the experts of the claimants by saying that the effort to challenge Deny's training and certification "simply do not controvert the government's proffered evidence of Deny's reliability." It must be remembered that this conclusion is not one made after trial evidence, but rather on a motion that, in this case, will obviate the need for a trial. Although the effort of these experts to "controvert the proffered evidence" may not have been well stated, controverting there surely was.
Innocently Contaminated Currency?
The court also rejected an innocently contaminated currency argument, relying on U.S. v. $30,670 (7th Cir. 2005). a case the district court said “puts to rest any argument that dog sniffs are universally unreliable based on the ‘currency contamination’ theory.”
Finally, counsel for the claimants argued that cross-contamination might be involved, that is that “Deny’s alert may have accurately detected the odor of narcotics, but that the briefcase and currency seized from Mr. Fallon became contaminated with that odor only after it was seized.” The court rejected this argument in the absence of supporting evidence. It is not that the possibility of contamination did not exist, but it must be acknowledged that the claimants had the burden of producing evidence that there might be some such contamination. It is not clear whether claimants were suggesting some fraud on the part of the police or considered that the area where the briefcase was hidden held cocaine residue or that somehow residue was accidentally put on the briefcase. Perhaps they intended to suggest that Romano knew that it would reflect well on him if the large amount of currency he had seen were forfeited, though they would have needed more than just possible motive and opportunity to get anywhere with this.
Was Summary Judgment Appropriate?
The court concluded that “the opinions of claimants’ experts do not raise a triable dispute as to the reliability of Deny’s alert. Accordingly, Deny’s alert to the briefcase supports the government’s claim of ‘a substantial connection between’ the seized funds and the commission of the drug-related offense.” Rejecting other non-canine-related arguments, the court determined that “the totality of circumstances in this case leads to only one reasonable conclusion—that the subject funds were substantially connected to a narcotics-related offense—the government is entitled to summary judgment of forfeiture.”
There was other evidence that the currency was involved in narcotics activities, such as the inconsistent and illogical stories provided by the claimants, yet the court and the government accepted that the canine evidence was fundamental to the government's position. That evidence, though not handled under the best of standards, did produce an alert. The possibility of cueing existed and claimants, though not presenting their evidence as well as might have been desired, should have had the opportunity to explore that issue and the dog's reliability at trial.
U.S. v. Funds in the Amount of One Hundred Thousand and One Hundred Twenty Dollars, 2011 WL 4686066 (N.D. Ill. 2011). For an extensive discussion of the history of currency sniffs, including probable cause issues, see Chapter 15 of Police and Military Dogs.
This blog was written by John Ensminger and L.E. Papet.
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