Recent Michigan Supreme Court Ruling is Baffling: Is a Homeowner's Front Porch His Property, or is it Public Property?

The Michigan Court of Appeals issued a ruling last month that seems strange.

It concerned a case where a drug sniffing dog accompanied a police officer to a person's house in Detroit; the dog indicated the presence of drugs inside the home from on the person's front porch. The police officer then entered and made arrests.

I have no problem with the drug bust itself.

But one of the arguments made during the trial and appeal was that the use of the dog without a search warrant was illegal. Kyllo vs. US (2001), a U.S. Supreme Court case, established that using a thermal imaging device outside a person's home to detect heat lamps used to grow weed without a search warrant was illegal.

The Michigan Court of Appeals ruled that dog sniffing dogs are outside the bounds of 4th Amendment protection, and that a person's front porch is public property, not private.

This makes no sense. Even if a person's front porch is considered to be public property, to get to it one has to trespass on the land between the road, which is public, and the house, which sits on private property.

This ruling threatens the property rights of homeowners. The police should have a search warrant for a drug bust; how hard can it be to talk to a judge to issue such a warrant?

The police should cover all their bases and do the extra paperwork. An operation like the one they broke up won't disappear overnight; it'll be there when they arrive with the warrant.