Ganjaprenur reports
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled 4-3 that the odor of cannabis is enough to justify police searches of vehicles, even though substances legal in the state can smell like illegal cannabis, the Associated Press reports. The decision overturns lower court rulings that said police officers could not be sure what they smelled was not a CBD product and, therefore, could not use the odor of cannabis as a reason to search a vehicle.
Wisconsin has not legalized cannabis for adult use.
The ruling focused on the case of Quaheem Moore, who in 2019 was pulled over alone for speeding and officers searched the vehicle he was driving based on the odor of cannabis. Moore told officers he was using a CBD vape pen and that the car was a rental that belonged to his brother. Police did not smell cannabis on Moore but upon searching him found cocaine and fentanyl. A circuit court judge and an appeals court had previously moved to disqualify the drugs that police found, saying the search wasn’t legal because cannabis odor was no justification for the search.
Justice Brian Hagedorn, who issued Tuesday’s opinion on behalf of the court’s conservative majority which disagreed with the lower courts, wrote that because Moore was the only person in the car, police could reasonably assume he “was probably connected with the illegal substance the officers identified.” The ruling referenced a 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision that found officers were justified in arresting a driver because they linked cannabis odor in the vehicle to him and that the “unmistakable” smell of a controlled substance was evidence that a crime had been committed.
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