5-4 is a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks. It's a progressive and occasionally profane take on the ideological battles at the heart of the Court's most important landmark cases; an irreverent tour of all the ways in which the law is shaped by politics.
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Listen each week as hosts Peter, Michael, and Rhiannon dismantle the Justices’ legal reasoning on hot-button issues like affirmative action, gun rights, and campaign finance, and use dark humor to reveal the high court's biases. Presented by Slow Burn co-creator Leon Neyfakh, and hosted by Rhiannon Hamam, Peter Shamshiri, and Michael Morbius. 5-4 is a production of Prologue Projects.
There is a glaring issue with this. Big. Big one. Big. And it is the question of false positives. Right? The court says that drug sniffing dogs aren't invading your privacy because the only thing they are capable of finding is illegal drugs. That's not actually true because drug sniffing dogs aren't a 100% accurate. There are false positives. Right? Of course. This is an argument that Caballus raised. And all Steven says in response to that is, quote, although respondent argues that the error rates, particularly the existence of false positives, call into question the premise that drug detection dogs alert only to contraband, the record contains no evidence or findings that support his argument. Now first of all, I don't think that's true because Souter in his dissent points out the state cited a study that included false positive rates. But So it is in the record. Right? Right. I mean, maybe he meant the lower court record. Right? But what Right. But second, if it's true that there's no evidence of error rates on the record, then why is the court assuming that the error rate is 0%. Right. Right. Why do you need evidence to show that false positives exist, but no evidence to show a 100% success rate. Right? It's wild. Dumb. On top of that, there is an issue that the court doesn't address at all, which is that even if it's not a false positive, you may have situations where an innocent person is searched and drugs are found. Mhmm. So the most obvious case is if a passenger, unbeknownst to the driver and owner of the car, is holding drugs. Right? Yeah. In that case, the dog identifies drugs, and the car can be legally searched even though the driver himself has committed no crime. Meaning the driver, who again has done nothing wrong, is having his or her privacy violated. Right? Right. Right. Right. The majority just ignores all of these realities. We
