Fitzgerald v. State

RAKER, Judge.

This case raises the issue of whether a canine sniff of an apartment door is a search under the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The United States Supreme Court and this Court have held that canine sniffs are non-searches for Fourth Amendment purposes. As the canine sniff doctrine does not depend upon the sniffs location, we shall hold that a sniff of an apartment door from a common area is a permissible non-search under the Fourth Amendment.

I

In February 2002, an anonymous source informed Detective Leeza Grim of the Howard County Police Department Criminal…