State v. Helzer

This is a companion case to State v. Foster, 350 Or 161, 252 P3d 292 (2011), decided this date. As does the defendant in Foster, defendant in this case challenges a warrant-less search of his car, urging that an alert to the car by a drug-detection dog did not give police probable cause to search it for seizable evidence of drugs. As we will explain, we conclude that the state failed to carry its burden to establish that the dog alert in this case was sufficiently reliable to provide police with probable cause to search. We therefore reverse the decision of the Court of Appeals and the…