Connecticut Resident Stopped By State Police For Radioactivity 545
Okian Warrior writes "A Milford, CT man was pulled over when a state police car radioactivity scanner flagged his car as being radioactive. The man had been given a cardiac exam using radioactive dye, and had a note from his physician attesting to this, but it raises questions about the legality of the stop. Given that it is not illegal to own or purchase or transport radioactive materials (within limits for hobbyist use), should the police be allowed to stop and search vehicles which show a slight level of radioactivity?"
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
You need more than just reasonable suspicion to get probable cause for a search. They are not the same thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_suspicion [wikipedia.org]
Reasonable suspicion is a legal standard of proof in United States law that is less than probable cause, the legal standard for arrests and warrants, but more than an "inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch'";[1] it must be based on "specific and articulable facts", "taken together with rational inferences from those facts".[2] Police may briefly detain a person if they have reasonable suspicion that the person has been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity; such a detention is known as a Terry stop. If police additionally have reasonable suspicion that a person so detained may be armed, they may "frisk" the person for weapons, but not for contraband like drugs. Reasonable suspicion is evaluated using the "reasonable person" or "reasonable officer" standard,[3] in which said person in the same circumstances could reasonably believe a person has been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity; it depends upon the totality of circumstances, and can result from a combination of particular facts, even if each is individually innocuous.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probable_cause [wikipedia.org]
"Probable cause" is a stronger standard of evidence than a reasonable suspicion, but weaker than what is required to secure a criminal conviction. Even hearsay can supply probable cause if it is from a reliable source or supported by other evidence, according to the Aguilar–Spinelli test.
It's not "slight" radioactivity (Score:5, Informative)
As a cardiac patient who has had isotope stress tests, and as a working chemist, let me state for the record that there is nothing "slight" about the level of radioactivity of a patient after one of these tests. Low level rad wastes, radioactive ores, uranium glass, all are slight levels of radioactivity, and measured as millionths of a Curie. The isotope used for stress tests is injected at 30,000 times higher levels, and the radiation emitted, gamma rays, penetrates through things like clothes, bone, muscle, and car doors.
The isotope used has a very short half-life so that two days after a test, there is very little radioactivity left, Right after a test a patient has a level of radioactivity that would scare the gloves off a rad-safety worker. If you point a Geiger counter at one of us, it doesn't click, it -whines-.
They pulled over a vehicle that was hot, and in other circumstances would represent a substantial safety hazard. More power to them.
Re:It's not "slight" radioactivity (Score:5, Informative)
Mod parent informative. Most people simply do not understand that stuff used in medical applications are often very powerful (but short lived) gamma emitters, far more powerful then, for example, a dirty bomb in a lead briefcase.
It's that powerful on purpose, to allow for accurate imaging.
I can top orig post - Just don't drive to Canada (Score:3, Informative)
My father-in-law had undergone a medical treatment for colon cancer where they implanted a dozen small pellets of radioactive material around his tumor.
Well he & his wife drove to Canada on a trip and crossing the border INTO Canada was no problem.
However, upon trying to re-enter the U.S. at the Border some radioactive detection system went off, an automatic barrier went up in front of their car and soon a dozen armed police were surrounding their car.
Needless to say a 78 yr old man and his wife were a bit shaken by the experience and my father-in-law was questioned for an hour and their car searched/scanned before they were permitted to continue.
I am grateful that our Border can detect this kind of stuff down to the microscopic levels because a terrorist would certainly have more on them than what was in my relative's butt...
Good thing my father-in-law is a totally funny guy and his retelling of the incident had me in stitches for hours.
Re:So (Score:2, Informative)
the police can search whatever they want if the owner gives consent, and most people in this situation probably would. If there were no consent that;s whee you start with the slippery slope business. IIRC anyhting in the car near where the driver/passengers are can be searched for weapons if there is reasonable suspicion, but opening the glove box/trunk/ any sealed container within the car requires a warrent. Unless the police impound the car, and then they can search it completely to take an inventory to make sure teh owner's property is returned when the police decide to return it.
Re:Defense Contractors (Score:5, Informative)
Re:So (Score:5, Informative)
Precisely. I did not know that. Not only built with radioactivity detectors, but ones that are on all the time and are damn sensitive if they are picking up the excess flux from a human inside a car from a tracer treatment administered presumably some nontrivial amount of time before from a distance of what -- 7 meters? 10? 20? -- while driving down the road. Tracers are often very short half-life elements -- that's why they use them -- lots or radioactivity but for a very short time. They tend to be produced in the hospital immediately before use and be mostly gone an hour or two later (but with an exponential tail). Clearly they nailed him right after he left the hospital, and he left the hospital rather quickly after the test, probably less than 45 minutes after the production of the tracer.
Are they sensitive enough to pick up a nuclear bomb being transported? Not if it is made with bomb-grade Uranium, which is also the easiest thing to make a bomb out of, but which isn't radioactive, although you might pick up the trigger. Plutonium 239 IS radioactive, producing a 5 MeV or so alpha at a rate sufficient to keep Plutonium warm to the touch, but alpha particles are relatively easy to block. It also typically contains Pu 240, which spontaneously fissions and produces a surplus flux of a few ~10 million neutrons per second from a typical core. Neutrons are more difficult to stop, but the intensity diminishes like 1/(4\pi r^2) so that the intensity at 10 meters is ~10^7/1250 or around 10^4 per meter squared per second. A detector as large as 1cm x 10 cm would then pick up 10 surplus neutrons per second at 10 meters, assuming there was zero attenuation in between and a perfect detector, neither of which is true. MAYBE this would give them signal to noise of a decibel or two, but given detector efficiency probably not until you were much closer. Up close it would be better, of course. Presumably their detectors have some sort of built in discriminator looking for sustained signal to noise above some cut-off.
What the patient was probably emitting is gamma. Gamma radiation has a long range and isn't easily blocked.
rgb
Re:GM Counter measurements are not Suspicions (Score:5, Informative)
No, that is "preponderance of evidence," which is the *standard of guilt* in civil cases. Reasonable suspicion, in contrast, is a low standard of proof in which a reasonable person could reasonably believe that someone has been, is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity, and depends on the entire circumstance. Seeing someone driving down the street emitting radiation from their vehicle, a reasonable person could conclude that something criminal is going on: either the person is transporting radioactive materials unsafely, or their car has been exposed to radiation, in which case the car and its driver could unwittingly pose a public safety risk, or it could be a bomb or other contraband. These are all *reasonable* conclusions one could draw from the fact that there is "a car driving down the highway emitting some nontrivial amount of ionizing radiation," there is reasonable suspicion that a crime may have been committed.
That's enough for a traffic stop, for the officer to investigate. Which he did. And when he stopped the guy, and told him he was setting off radiation detectors, the guy said, "Yeah, I was injected with radioactive dye today for a health test, and I have this letter from my doctor, who actually warned me that this could happen." He provided that letter to the doctor, and he went on his way. Because there was no probable cause for an arrest - no probable cause supporting the conclusion that a crime actually had been committed.
Now, if there was probable cause (like, say, a bunch of wires and what appears to be a remote detonator sitting on the seat, or the police ask him to step out of the vehicle and frisk him and find a weapon), they'd be able to search the vehicle without a warrant and arrest him if they found probable cause to believe he was committing a crime.
After that, he would need to be found guilty by a preponderance of the evidence (irrelevant in this case, but if it were a civil case that would be the burden of proof), or beyond a reasonable doubt (in a criminal case).
Each of these is a *higher* standard of proof than the last. Reasonable Suspicion, Probable Cause, Preponderance of the Evidence, and Beyond Reasonable Doubt.
You do not have to satisfy the standard of evidence for legal trials to make a traffic stop, or make an arrest. You DO have to satisfy that standard of evidence, and even more, show beyond reasonable doubt, that he is guilty to get a conviction.
No, there's reasonable suspicion. Enough to initiate a traffic stop and investigate what's going on. Probable cause would be required for an arrest, which did not happen.
Which would, again, create a *reasonable suspicion* that there is something illegal going on - since hobbyists have always been safe, and there's about a dozen possible reasons a car would be giving off radiation, and only one of them is "the guy may have been injected with a radioactive dye," a *reasonable* person could conclude that there is a likelihood of a crime being committed.
And probable cause is only needed to make an arrest, not initiate a traffic stop. This implies that radiation detected is very uncommon, and so when something very uncommon and known to be unhealthy to humans is detected, it is, in fact, reasonable to be suspicious that something illegal may have occurred, and to investigate the source of the radiation. And that's what happened.
Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
they notice you weaving, driving erratically, speeding, emitting radiation, taking a slug from a Jack Daniels bottle, running a red light, rolling through a stop sign
One of these things is not like the others...
Maybe you can point to the one which isn't illegal, sleuth!
Re:Defense Contractors (Score:4, Informative)
No, those are PrePass transponders that are used to "pre-clear" trucks belonging to carriers that participate in the PrePass program, usually allowing them to bypass the weigh station based on a variety of criteria. That's not to say that there aren't radioactivity sensors in places along the highway (dunno if there are or not), but the six-sided elongated devices mounted in widely-spaced pairs right before weigh stations are most definitely PrePass boxes.
Re:So (Score:4, Informative)