Supreme Court likes dogs who are good at meth

Don't you dare question Aldo That dog? His name is Aldo, and he's a German shepherd who has been trained to detect methamphetamine, marijuana, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy. You don't want to mess with Aldo.

When Aldo's officer, William Wheetley, pulled over Clayton Harris's truck because it had an expired license plate, Harris looked visibly nervous, unable to sit still, shaking and breathing rapidly. He also had an open can of beer in the truck's cup holder, and did not consent to his car's being searched. That doesn't stop Aldo, who was summoned over and started signalling that he smelled drugs by the driver's door handle. Wheetley concluded that gave him probable cause for a search, and while he didn't find anything Aldo normally finds, he did find, umm ...  

200 loose pseudoephedrine pills, 8,000 matches, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, two containers of antifreeze, and a coffee filter full of iodine crystals'all ingredients for making methamphetamine.

Harris was arrested and Mirandized, and confessed to cooking meth. Harris later challenged the arrest on the grounds that while trained, Aldo's skills were not properly verified. The Florida Supreme Court agreed, holding that objective evidence such as field performance records (showing false positives, for example) and other objective evidence about the dog's reliability were needed, given that the police only kept a log of when Aldo did correctly find contraband.

Come below the fold and learn what the Supreme Court had to say about Aldo.