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Maryland’s highest court has tossed the conviction of a man on drug charges because the arresting officer in Prince George’s County based his search and subsequent arrest on the odor of ether, an ingredient in PCP. The officer found a small, half-full glass vial of the drug in the pocket of the suspect’s pants, but the court ruled that merely smelling it did not meet the requirements to legally conduct the search. According to a news report by Peter Hermann in the Baltimore Sun, the court’s ruling limits law enforcement officers during “stop and frisk” actions. Aggressive stop and frisks were associated with the so-called “zero-tolerance policing.”
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Zero-tolerance policing was embraced by the City of Baltimore in 2001. According to Peter Hermann, Baltimore police were conducting more than 130,000 such stops a year by 2005, but the practice was criticized by prosecutors and even the police union, whose president at the time dubbed them “VCR Stops,” short for “Violation of Civil Rights.”
Law enforcement officers across the country comply with a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Terry v. Ohio, which set the standard by which law enforcement officers can detain and search a person without a warrant. The case expanded police powers.
Before the landmark High Court decision, officers had to have evidence that a crime was committed before making a detention. The court ruled under Terry that police could stop and frisk a person “not to discover evidence of a crime, but rather to protect the police officer and bystanders from harm.”
That limited the stop to a search for weapons, and the court made it clear that the search was “limited to a pat-down of the outer clothing.” Long known as the “Terry Stop,” the rule is well known in every agency. “It’s drilled into you in the academy,” said Gary Mc-Lhinney, former chief of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police Department and a longtime president of the Baltimore F.O.P.
“It’s the essence of what we do. Without a complete knowledge and understanding of Terry, not a lot of police work can go on.” Courts across the country are constantly redefining the rule and many officers are frustrated with the changes that seem irrelevant when confronted with real-life situations on the street.
In this report, Peter Hermann writes, “Cops look at cases such as the smell test and say unequivocally that the cop made a righteous bust. He smelled the prime ingredient in an illegal drug, noted the man’s glassy eyes, noticed that he suspiciously avoided answering a routine question and was standing an open-air drug market.
“But others say that for every one of these stops that turns up drugs, there are scores of people jacked up who are in fact innocent, who shouldn’t have to suffer the injustice and humiliation of being searched on a public street.” Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites        
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