The Kansas Court of Appeals and Supreme Court typically releases new decisions every Friday morning. This week, we had an asset forfeiture case come before the appeals case.
The case, titled State v. One 2008 Toyota Tundra (in forfeiture cases, the assets subject to forfeiture are named as the Defendant) involved a truck, cash, and marijuana seized in a traffic stop on I-70 in Geary County. The Geary County Sheriff’s deputy pulled the Tundra over for a partially obstructed license plate. While doing the standard license, registration, and insurance check, he asked the driver and passenger about their travel plans. Based on their answer (that they were going from Ohio to Las Vegas) the deputy suspected they were running drugs. After the license check came back, the deputy requested an additional criminal check on the driver, buying him enough time to have his dog, Scooby, sniff the truck.
At this point in the opinion, judge Anthony Powell managed to insert a stealth pun:
At the 8:54 mark, what did Scooby do? Scooby indicated the presence of drugs at the truck’s rear passenger-side corner of the tailgate area.
In the forfeiture proceedings at the district court, the truck’s passenger filed a motion to suppress the stop, claiming that the stop should have ended when the registration check came back, and that the extended background check and dog sniff constituted an unreasonable search and seizure. The district court granted the motion, the state appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the suppression.
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