Eric Lebron Burney v. United States
FourthAmendment CriminalProcedure Patent Privacy
Does the smell of legal, low-THC marijuana provide probable cause for law enforcement to conduct an extensive search behind the internal framing and upholstery of an automobile?
By April of 2019 both the state of Tennessee and the federal government excluded low-THC (delta-9 marijuana from the definition of illegal “marijuana” as a controlled substance. That resulted in the proliferation of legal, low-THC marijuana products (often termed “hemp” by statute), which look, smell, and smoke the same as the illegal, high-THC variant of the same plant. The question presented here is: Does the smell of legal, low-THC marijuana provide probable cause for law enforcement to conduct an extensive search behind the internal framing and upholstery of an automobile?