Posts: Links / Dogs used for questionable scent line-ups

I had never even heard of this before. I don't see how it could be considered anything more than an investigative tool AT BEST. Definitely has no evidentiary value on its own. I have seen search dogs walk right by subjects without 'hitting' on them. Granted that's different than the 'scent' technique shown here, but in my experience the dogs make mistakes.

Are there any studies that prove this method may prove useful in nabbing guilty parties involved in crimes?

Doug Lowry, the president of the National Police Bloodhound Association, a nonprofit group that holds seminars on using bloodhounds in police work, said in an affidavit that he watched video of Pikett's lineups and found them "disturbing." Pikett's dogs appeared to be "just taking a walk in the park instead of conducting scent lineups."

The association stopped training police to do scent lineups several years ago because "very few bloodhound teams were found to be consistently proficient" and there were "too many variables involved," Lowry said.

In the lawsuits, the plaintiffs accuse Pikett of manufacturing evidence and say his scent lineups are merely an "elaborate performance." Pikett denies the allegations.

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The lawsuits aren't the first time someone took action against Pikett. In 2008, a now former Harris County assistant prosecutor e-mailed his colleagues to warn them about the "unreliable evidence" that came from Pikett's work with Houston police, according to an affidavit.

Dr. Alejandro del Carmen, the chairman of the University of Texas at Arlington's criminology and criminal justice department, compared scent identification to primitive criminology theories that identified suspects by body type. The once-accepted theory was that skinny people were too shy and heavy people too lazy to commit crimes.

"As a trained criminologist and a Ph.D., I find it nerve-racking that the justice system would rely on the ability of a dog to predict someone's guilt or innocence," del Carmen said.

FROM A DIFFERENT ARTICLE

I feel bad for the falsely accused.