In Prince George's County, the cops failed the smell test.

Maryland's highest court this month threw out the conviction of a man on drug charges because the arresting officer based his search and subsequent arrest on the odor of ether, an ingredient in PCP. The officer found a small, half-full glass vial of the drug in the man's pants pocket, but the court ruled that merely smelling it didn't give the officer the legal grounds to conduct the search.

The ruling further limits police in how they conduct the most routine and common of citizen stops, a practice carried out thousands upon thousands of times on the streets of Baltimore and in cities and towns across Maryland and beyond.

Called Stop and Frisk, the tactic invoked cries of zero-tolerance policing when a past Baltimore police administration made it the centerpiece of its crime-fighting strategy in 2001. By 2005, police were conducting more than 130,000 such stops a year, a practice criticized by prosecutors and even by the police union, whose president at the time dubbed them "VCR Stops," short for "Violation of Civil Rights."

Those numbers have dropped sharply under more recent police commissioners and shifting strategies, but the stops continue to irk civil rights activists and residents who complain police too often frisk young black men at random and without sufficient reason.

Police throughout the country are governed by a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision called Terry v. Ohio, which set the standard by which law enforcement officers can detain and search a person without a warrant. The case expanded police powers, which had required that officers demonstrate evidence of a crime before making a detention.

The court ruled under Terry that police could stop and frisk a person, "not to discover evidence of a crime, but rather to protect the police officer and bystanders from harm." That limited the stop to a search for weapons, and the court made it clear that the search was "limited to a pat-down of the outer clothing."

In police parlance, the tactic is known as a "Terry Stop" and any cop who walks or rides a beat is familiar with the term.

"It's drilled into you in the academy," said Gary McLhinney, former chief of the Maryland Transportation Authority Police Department and a longtime union chief for city cops. "It's the essence of what we do. Without a complete knowledge and understanding of Terry, not a lot of police work can go on."

Courts across the country constantly refine the do's and don'ts allowed under Terry, forcing cops to constantly adjust to subtle changes in the rules that they argue are hard to follow and are meaningless in real-life, dangerous situations on the street.

Cops look at cases such as the Prince George's smell test and say unequivocally that the cop made a righteous bust. He smelled the prime ingredient in an illegal drug, noted the man's glassy eyes, noticed that he suspiciously avoided answering a routine question and was standing an open-air drug market. Not to mention the obvious - he had drugs in his pocket.

But others say that for every one of these stops that turns up drugs, there are scores of people jacked up who are in fact innocent, who shouldn't have to suffer the injustice and humiliation of being searched on a public street.

Andrew C. White, a former federal prosecutor in Baltimore who now works as a defense lawyer, said the intricacies of a Terry stop are under constant review "because they encompass so many different factors" and deal with "what's a reasonable suspicion for a police officer to intrude into someone's life."

He said "police are faced with a myriad of different situations that in totality may or may not add up, and they've got to make the call." The court ruling, White said, "is a reflection of the sentiment that individuals do have rights, and the right not to be intruded upon by police is a fairly significant right."

Defense lawyers have long complained that instead of setting legal boundaries for cops, Terry gives police a broad license to stop and frisk anyone under the pretense the person is armed. Baltimore police have a gun squad and the detectives are trained in how to recognize whether a person might have a gun. The weight of the weapon can make people lean to one side to compensate. Cops look for bulges in shirts or pants, or a person who is wearing a winter coat on a summer day. Hand movements are studied closely. It's never one thing, but a totality of circumstances that can lead to proper probable cause for a stop.

The case in Prince George's County begins with a routine encounter. In August 2006, Officer Rodney Lewis, patrolling a street in Landover known for brisk drug sales, spotted Robert Bailey standing next to a house. The officer twice yelled to him, "Excuse me, sir, do you live there?"

Getting no response, Lewis walked over to the man - close enough, he said, "to reach out and touch him" - and reported that he smelled a "strong odor of ether." The officer grabbed Bailey's hands, searched him and found the vial of PCP in a pocket.

Bailey was convicted of possessing drugs and was sentenced to two years in prison.

The state's highest court, ruling on his appeal, noted that the police officer justified his search using four criteria - the odor of ether, the man's refusal to initially acknowledge his question, the fact he was standing in the shadows in a known drug area and that he had glassy eyes. The officer had noted in his report that he searched Bailey to make sure he wasn't armed, but the court said he did not have a reasonable suspicion a gun might be found.

The court ruled that Bailey's hands were visible, he made no threatening move and there was no indication he was selling drugs.

The court did say that certain smells - such as marijuana or even the odor of PCP from a lighted pipe - could be sufficient to conduct a legal search. But they noted it's not illegal to possess ether, commonly used in household products.

"We are unaware of any cases in which a court held that the smell of ether or another lawful substance associated with contraband, on its own, constituted probable cause for a belief that contraband was present or a crime was committed," the court ruled.

In a dissenting opinion dripping with condescending prose, highlighting the dilemma cops on the street find themselves in, two judges noted the officer was well-versed in smells associated with drugs and that his experience, coupled with the suspect being in a high-crime area and acting suspiciously, provided more than enough legal justification to stop and frisk.

"To his credit and training, Officer [Rodney] Lewis at least appreciated the odor of ether present and emanating from Bailey and associated it with the role in the life cycle of a specific illicit drug, PCP," the judges wrote.

They concluded:

"The only things that could have undermined the probable cause might have been had Bailey been dressed in a hospital gown (suggesting the smell of ether may have been incident to the administration of an archaic form of anesthesia to facilitate medical treatment) or a maid's outfit (suggesting that he had been or was in the act of applying household aerosol cleaners or solvents to the interior or exterior of the town house)."

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