Ricco Saine v. United States

In 2018, Congress removed hemp from the Controlled Substances Act and placed it into the stream of lawful interstate commerce. Now-legal hemp and illegal marijuana derive from the same plant and produce the same odor; no K9 or field test can tell them apart. In this case, a police K9 trained to detect cannabis (in all its forms, legal and illegal) alerted to petitioner’s vehicle, prompting a search that spawned no drug-related charges. But the search revealed a firearm, which the Government convicted the petitioner of possessing under 18 U. S. C. §§ 922(g)(1) and 924(e)(1). The Sixth Circuit affirmed that conviction, holding that the dog alert supplied probable cause for the vehicle search and that petitioner had failed to meet his burden to prove otherwise. The question presented is: Whether a drug-detection dog’s alert to cannabis— a substance that encompasses both legal hemp and illegal marijuana—provides probable cause to conduct a warrantless vehicle search when the alert may signal more than “the presence or absence of narcotics, a contraband item.” See United States v. Place, 462 U. S. 696, 707 (1983); see also Illinois v. Caballes, 543 U. S. 405, 409 (2005).