The Illinois Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the odor of raw cannabis is sufficient to justify a warrantless vehicle search.
The appellant, Vincent Molina, was a passenger in a car stopped by a police officer for speeding on the highway. The officer searched the car solely based on smelling raw cannabis and found several rolled joints. Molina was charged with a misdemeanor for violating Illinois’s Motor Vehicle Code requirement that “[n]o passenger may possess cannabis within any passenger area of any motor vehicle upon a highway…except in a secured, sealed or resealable, odor-proof, child-resistant cannabis container that is inaccessible.”
Molina asked the trial court to suppress the raw cannabis as evidence in trial. In granting the motion to suppress, the trial court ruled that the smell of raw cannabis from a vehicle was insufficient to establish the probable cause needed for a warrantless vehicle search because of the possibility of people having contact with raw cannabis for work or medical use.
The Illinois Supreme Court found the trial court’s reasoning flawed because police officers are not required to rule out innocent explanations to establish probable cause. They explained that probable cause “requires only that the facts available to the officer — including the plausibility of an innocent explanation — would warrant a reasonable man to believe there is a reasonable probability’ that a search of the automobile will uncover contraband or evidence of criminal activity.” The Supreme Court added that the police officer in Molina’s case did not find any innocent explanations for the smell in the vehicle.
However, the court upheld their precedent that “‘the odor of burnt cannabis, alone, is insufficient to provide probable cause for police officers to perform a warrantless search of a vehicle.” It continued, “[U]nlike the odor of burnt cannabis, the odor of raw cannabis coming from a vehicle reliably points to when, where, and how the cannabis is possessed — namely, currently, in the vehicle, and not in an odor-proof container. ”
Therefore, the court found that a police officer who is trained to distinguish between burnt and raw cannabis and who smelled raw cannabis from a vehicle stopped on the highway would have probable cause to believe there was raw cannabis in the vehicle that was not in an odor-proof container. The court found the officer in Molina’s case had probable cause to search the car given that he was trained to distinguish between burnt and raw cannabis.
A dissent found the majority on the Supreme Court gave undue evidentiary weight to the restrictions imposed on the transportation of raw cannabis. “Because cannabis, both raw and burnt, is legal notwithstanding multiple restrictions, there is a low degree of suspicion that attaches to its odor,” the dissent read. The dissent also found the majority’s ruling “to continue to stigmatize the use of cannabis despite the legislative efforts to legalize the use of cannabis.”
Molina’s trial is still ongoing, but now the prosecution may use the raw cannabis the police retrieved from their search of the vehicle as evidence in trial.
