United States v. Bentley, No. 13-2995 (7th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CaseA police officer followed a vehicle after discovering that its owner’s driver’s license had expired 18 years earlier. He initiated a traffic stop after observing the vehicle cross into another lane on an Illinois highway without signaling. After the driver, Bentley, changed his story about why he was driving the vehicle, and officers observed that the spare tire was in the back seat, officers decided to call for a drug-detection dog, “Lex.” Lex alerted, and the officers found close to 15 kilograms of cocaine in the vehicle. Bentley gathered evidence suggesting “that Lex is lucky the Canine Training Institute doesn’t calculate class rank. If it did, Lex would have been at the bottom of his class.” Bentley argued that Lex might alert every time he is called out. The Seventh Circuit affirmed his conviction, citing the Supreme Court’s decision in Florida v. Harris (2013), and upholding the finding that Lex’s alert, along with the other evidence relating to the stop, was sufficient to support probable cause.
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