Whitehead v. Com.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that, after a drug dog alerted at a vehicle, fruitless searches of a car and three occupants did not, by process of elimination, allow a physical search of a fourth occupant
• holding that Whitehead’s mere status as a passenger in a vehicle on which a drug dog alerted, without evidence that he and the other passengers were engaged in a common enterprise involving criminal activity, did not provide the officers with probable cause to search Whitehead’s person
• noting that the Court could have found that probable cause existed if there were evidence that a suspect “individually was committing, had committed, or was about to commit a criminal offense”
• distinguishing that case from Pringle where “the positive [K-9 unit] alert and the fruitless searches [of the other occupants] were not sufficient to establish probable cause particularized as to [the defendant] that he was concealing contraband on his person”
• “Thus, the actual question is whether probable cause existed to arrest Whitehead.”
• “mere proximity to criminal activity alone is insufficient to establish probable cause”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).