I was reading this article about this guy who made the seemingly innocent mistake of driving through Nebraska with a large amount of money in his rented car.

This guy—Gonzales had teamed up with a partner and combined their life savings to buy a refrigerated truck and start a produce business. In total, they had $124,700 in cash. Gonzales found a truck for sale in Chicago and flew out there on a one-way ticket with the cash to buy it. However, when he got there, the truck had already been sold. So, with all this cash and no truck, he decided to rent a car to drive back. Since he didn’t have a credit card, he had someone else rent the car for him. Nervous about traveling with so much money, he hid the money in a cooler and stuck it in the trunk of the rental. Off he goes back home, until he gets pulled over for speeding.

A Nebraska state trooper stopped him on the interstate and in the process of giving him a ticket, noticed the guy’s name wasn’t on the rental contract. He started questioning Gonzales, who had a limited ability with English and ended up searching the car. He found the cooler with the cash and called in a K9 unit, thinking this guy must be either going to buy drugs or has just sold some and is slinking home with the profit.

The police dog shows up and sniffs out the car. When the dog gets to the cash, he starts barking. The cop tells Gonzales that he suspects him of trafficking drugs and confiscates the fucking cash! All of it!

Here’s the problem, up to 80% of US currency has trace amounts of cocaine on it. You take enough cash, especially the “I’ve been saving all my life in jars buried in the backyard” variety of cash, put it all together, yeah, it’s not so surprising a drug dog’s going to smell smell something.

Gonzales and his patner contested the seizure, won a ruling, but an appeal by the police had a circuit judge ruling against them and making the judgement that “Possession of a large sum of cash is ’strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.

Read the article. there’s no point in me rehashing the whole thing. The point is, I think it’s fucking ridiculous. I’d also argue that what the circuit judge realy wanted to say was “Possession of a large sum of cash and driving while Latino is ’strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.” It’s fucking disgusting.

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