Curtilage; Good Faith Doctrine
Defendant’s 4th Amendment rights were violated by police who had brought a narcotics-detection dog to sniff at the front door of his home without first obtaining a search warrant because U.S. Supreme Court precedent established in 2013 that such a search violated the prohibition on unreasonable searches in areas in which there was an expectation of privacy. However, the trial court properly denied defendant’s motion to exclude evidence seized as a result of the unconstitutional search because the search had taken place prior to the Supreme Court decision, and the officers had acted in good faith and upon reasonable reliance on the propriety of their actions such that Texas law applied to render the fruit of the subsequent search of the house untainted.
