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InvisibleveggieM

Registered: 07/25/04
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Local drug seizure case heads to federal court [NH]
    #6434492 - 01/07/07 11:56 AM (17 years, 24 days ago)

Local drug seizure case heads to federal court
January 7, 2007 - nashuatelegraph.com

CONCORD – Keith Vignola was packing a pot pipe in his sock and $9,940 cash in a pants pocket when a Wilton police officer arrested him on a domestic violence warrant June 11, 2005, court records show.

Vignola, 40, of Milford, admitted to a misdemeanor marijuana charge and paid a $180 fine, but he has been unable to reclaim his $9,940 because the federal government argues it should be confiscated as drug money and turned over to police.

The forfeiture case, pending in U.S. District Court, is one of many around the country in which the government has seized cash or other assets without ever filing drug-dealing charges. Federal courts have upheld the practice, ruling the government can seize cash if prosecutors can show by a “preponderance of the evidence” that the money has a “substantial connection” to drug dealing.

That standard sets a lower hurdle than the “beyond reasonable doubt” bar prosecutors must clear to win a criminal conviction, and courts have upheld forfeitures based on largely circumstantial evidence.

In Vignola’s case, as in others around the country, the only direct evidence to link his cash to cocaine comes from the nose of a discerning dog.

More than a month after his arrest, on July 20, 2005, a New Hampshire State Police drug detection dog and its handler examined the cash found in Vignola’s pocket.

The dog “alerted to the presence of drug residue on the currency, indicating that the funds had been involved in a drug transaction,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Rabuck e-mailed in response to questions from The Telegraph in November.

Vignola’s lawyer, Larry Vogelman of Manchester, didn’t return two calls seeking comment on his case, which is scheduled for trial in July in U.S. District Court.

Courts around the country have wrestled for years with what to make of drug-sniffing dogs’ “alert” to a stash of cash, and the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers New Hampshire and much of New England, hasn’t weighed in on the issue in nearly a decade.

Back in the 1980s, most courts considered a drug dog’s alert to cash as solid evidence suggesting the money was linked to drugs, said Terry Fleck, a retired deputy sheriff and canine handler in South Lake Tahoe, Calif. Fleck now works as a consultant and runs a Web site, www.k9fleck.org, devoted to legal issues involving the use of dogs in law enforcement.

During the 1990s, however, defense lawyers began citing studies that showed widespread cocaine contamination in U.S. currency. One such study, published in the Journal of Analytical Toxicology in 1996, found trace amounts of cocaine powder on 79 percent of $1 bills sampled from different American cities. Researchers believe the bills pick up trace amounts of fine powdered cocaine from contact with actual drug money, mainly through automated counting and sorting machines.

Armed with such studies, defense lawyers persuaded many courts that a drug dog’s alert couldn’t mean much, since there was cocaine on everyone’s cash.

“The courts got confused on this issue,” Fleck said. “If that was really true, if every police dog in the United States alerted to that, then dogs would be alerting to every single wallet in your office.”

In fact, Fleck said, the trace amounts of cocaine commonly found on cash are too minute and too old to give off any odor. The smell of fresh cocaine, on the other hand, is unmistakable to a trained dog, and will stick for a time to anything in close contact, he said. Fleck compared it to cooking popcorn in a microwave.

“You cook popcorn in your microwave tonight, and what does your house smell like?” he asked.

Similarly, when cash is counted near large amounts of cocaine, it picks up an odor that a trained dog can detect for days or weeks afterward, Fleck said.

“It’s going to permeate and taint whatever it’s associated with,” he said.

Dogs, of course, have a much keener sense of smell than humans, even if there’s no accounting for their olfactory preferences.

“There is no machine that can come close to a dog,” Fleck said. “It’s still the most selective device that we have.”

Rulings based on more recent research have begun to restore credence in drug-detection dogs’ work. Rabuck, the assistant U.S. attorney, cited work by two researchers at the International Forensic Research Institute at Florida International University, Kenneth Furton and Stefan Rose, who study detection dogs and have developed standards for their training and certification.

Among their findings, Rabuck wrote, Furton and Rose showed that dogs “alert” not to cocaine itself, but to the scent it gives off, which is mostly methyl benzoate. Besides being a byproduct of cocaine, methyl benzoate is a sweet-smelling liquid commonly used in perfume and as a solvent.

“Methyl benzoate is volatile, and its signature odor will not remain on individual bills after a brief exposure to the air,” Rabuck wrote. “Accordingly, drug dogs do not alert to currency in general circulation, but to currency that has been in recent contact with controlled substances, such as cocaine, indicating that the currency was involved in a drug transaction.”

The smell will linger longer when the money is bundled or wrapped up, he added.

A 2001 opinion by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers California and other western states, outlines the evolution of how courts have handled drug-dog evidence. The court upheld the forfeiture of $22,474 from Derek Mahone, who was caught carrying the cash on a flight from Cleveland to Phoenix.

The court first noted its own 1989 ruling that a drug dog’s alert to cash was “strong evidence” of a drug connection.

“More recently,” the court continued, “we have indicated a reluctance to rely too heavily upon drug-detection dog alerts to contaminated money because of evidence that there is widespread contamination of currency in circulation in certain areas of the country.”

In the case at hand, however, the court concluded, prosecutors showed that the dog was trained to signal only to the odors given off from cocaine.

“Moreover, the government provided evidence that unless the currency Mahone was carrying had recently been in the proximity of cocaine, the detection dog would not have alerted to it,” the ruling stated.

That 2001 Ninth Circuit ruling was a “turning point,” Fleck said, and other courts have since begun to follow in giving drug dogs’ alerts more weight. Rabuck cited a recent ruling by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in which the courts upheld the seizure of $124,700 based on largely circumstantial evidence and the signal of a trained drug-sniffing dog.

New England’s First Circuit Court of Appeals hasn’t ruled on the issue since 1997, however. The dog’s alert was a lesser issue in that case, and the court didn’t count it for much, citing the currency contamination theory.

Courts have differed on what other evidence prosecutors must offer to prove a forfeiture case in addition to a drug-detection dog’s indication, Rabuck wrote.

Beyond the drug-sniffing dog, Rabuck cites other circumstantial evidence to try to show that Vignola must have been dealing drugs.

In cases around the country, prosecutors have argued and courts agreed that carrying a large amount of cash is inherently shady, and the lack of a legitimate explanation for doing so can be taken as evidence of criminal behavior.

Vignola was unemployed at the time of his arrest, Rabuck noted in his petition for forfeiture, and he and his mother gave differing – though not mutually exclusive – accounts of the $9,940. Vignola described the money as his life’s savings. His mother, Patricia Lessard, wrote that the money came from the sale of his motorcycle and the settlement of an accident claim, and furthermore, that he owed a good deal of it to her for back rent.

Although Rabuck made no mention of it in the forfeiture claim, Vignola also has a history of dealing cocaine. Evidence of past crimes generally can’t be used against a person in criminal cases, but federal courts have allowed prosecutors to cite prior drug-dealing convictions as evidence in forfeiture cases.

Nashua police arrested Vignola on cocaine dealing charges after an undercover investigation in 2001. Police had bought cocaine from Vignola, and after his arrest, they found a shotgun, a .45-caliber pistol, night vision glasses and a rifle scope set to keep watch on the street outside his second-floor apartment at 27½ Hanover St.

Vignola later pleaded guilty to possession of cocaine with the intent to sell it and three cocaine sales charges. He was sentenced March 27, 2002, to 1½ to three years in prison, Hillsborough County Superior Court records show.

Although he hasn’t been charged again, the government argues through its forfeiture case that he went back into business after his release.


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Invisiblefastfred
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Re: Local drug seizure case heads to federal court [NH] [Re: veggie]
    #6436172 - 01/07/07 08:01 PM (17 years, 24 days ago)

> The dog “alerted to the presence of drug residue on the currency, indicating that the funds had been involved in a drug transaction,”

That's kinda funny because drug dogs are also trained to sniff out cash. What bullshit. I had a friend who had $500 tucked under his mattress which the drug dogs easily sniffed out. It had come straight from the bank and no other drugs were found.

If you don't believe it then take a wad of fresh bank money and smell it. Obviously drug dogs can be trained to sniff out money, and I know for fact that they are.


-FF


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Offlinededjam
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Re: Local drug seizure case heads to federal court [NH] [Re: fastfred]
    #6437449 - 01/08/07 07:21 AM (17 years, 23 days ago)

Drug dogs are trained to "alert" at the command of their trainer...drugs or not.


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