The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that the odor of marijuana, on its own, does not establish probable cause for police officers to search a car.
The ruling came in the case of a 2021 traffic stop in Meeker County where Adam Torgerson was pulled over by Litchfield police for having too many auxiliary lights on his vehicle’s grill. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana coming out of the open vehicle window. Torgerson, who was driving with his wife and a child, denied there was weed in the car.
A second officer approached and said he, too, smelled weed. The officers ordered everyone out of the vehicle and searched it, finding a small amount of methamphetamine and some paraphernalia.
Torgerson was not driving erratically, nor was there any evidence of a crime in open view when the officers approached the car. They based their probable cause finding solely on the marijuana odor.
A district court subsequently ruled that the evidence obtained from the search was inadmissible. Even in 2021, there were certain circumstances in which possession of marijuana was legal. Medical marijuana patients could possess it, for instance, and industrial hemp (which looks and smells a lot like regular marijuana) was also legal. The possession of small quantities of pot had also been decriminalized by that point—still prohibited by statute, but not in itself a crime.
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