These legal news picks that I recently came across are off topic for my blog, but constitutionally, the decisions are interesting. The Flint, Michigan story is worthy of note, because the police are profiling individuals that wear sagging pants.

Police director sues for critical bloggers’ names:

The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.

“In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment,” the anonymous bloggers write on the site, “Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States

Fashion police: Flint cracks down on sagging: Some people call it a fad. But for the city of Flint, Mich., that urban style known as ’sagging’ is now a criminal offense:

Young people call this unkempt look a fashion choice. But for David Dicks, Flint’s new police chief, it’s a national nuisance. Dicks has ordered his officers to start arresting “saggers,” as some aficionados of this sartorial style call themselves, on sight, threatening them with jail time and hefty fines for a fad he calls “immoral self expression.” He later told a local paper the style could give officers probable cause to search saggers.

Police in Wisconsin can legally run drug-sniffing dogs around cars during traffic stops:

Justice Patience Roggensack, writing for the majority in a 4-3 opinion, said the court would not deviate from the U.S. Supreme Court’s findings that dog sniffs aren’t searches and don’t violate a person’s federal rights.

A person in a car has no reasonable expectation of privacy in the air space around it and a sniff-search is minimally intrusive, Roggensack added.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Court rules that dog sniffing outside car was constitutional:

The minority opinion suggested that the defense still could raise issues of whether police had probable cause and that could exclude the key evidence against the man, Ramon Lopez Arias, when the case returns to the circuit court for trial.

The majority opinion, written by Patience Drake Roggensack, found that a police dog’s sniffing of the exterior of a car did not constitute a police search and that the officer did not unreasonably prolong the stop of the car to complete his investigation.

.       .       .

“A dog sniff of the exterior of a vehicle located in a public place does not constitute a search under the Wisconsin Constitution,” Roggensack writes, adding that the dog sniff extended Arias’ stop by 78 seconds. “Under the totality of the circumstances, it is not an unreasonable incremental intrusion upon Arias’ liberty.”

In the dissenting opinion, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley noted that the initial stop of the car was unrelated to a drug investigation, a crucial test. She also noted that when the case returns to circuit court, the issue of whether the officer had probable cause to stop the car should be addressed.

Wis. court: Searches without warrants were illegal:

Police in Racine arrested Dwight Sanders in his house in 2005 after responding to an animal cruelty complaint.

They searched his bedroom twice and found cocaine, although it’s not clear whether they discovered the drug during the first or second sweep.

Sanders has argued the searches were illegal because the officers needed warrants.

The Supreme Court agreed, saying the officers had a right to conduct the initial search to protect themselves. But seizing the canister then – if that’s what happened – went beyond that.

The court says the officers needed a warrant for the second search.