Kansas Highway Patrol ‘waged war on motorists’ with marijuana vehicle searches: Judge
Breccan F. Thies
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A federal judge ruled Friday that a Kansas “two-step” technique for police to search vehicles for marijuana is unconstitutional.
The lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas argued that the maneuver violated the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures from government authorities.
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U.S. District Judge Kathryn H. Vratil, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush who took senior status in 2014, agreed, ordering the Kansas Highway Patrol to stop using the technique and stating that police had “waged war on motorists.”
“As wars go, this one is relatively easy; it’s simple and cheap, and for motorists, it’s not a fair fight,” Vratil wrote. “The war is basically a question of numbers: stop enough cars and you’re bound to discover drugs.”
The two-step process involves Kansas troopers targeting motorists with out-of-state tags, particularly from neighboring Colorado and Missouri, where marijuana is legal, in an attempt to find the drugs that are illegal in Kansas.
Once an officer has resolved the initial reason for pulling a driver over, the officer would walk back to the cruiser, turn back around, and begin a separate line of questioning involving travel plans. The officer would illegally detain drivers with the line of questioning, the lawsuit argued, without consent or reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.
The officer would then search the vehicle or get a K-9 unit to do so.
According to the lawsuit, drivers with out-of-state license plates accounted for 93% of KHP stops in 2017, and 96% of KHP’s civil forfeitures in 2019 came from out-of-state motorists on I-70.
“Today’s decision validates that motorists’ constitutional rights cannot be cast aside under the guise of a ‘war on drugs,’” ACLU Kansas legal director Sharon Brett said in a press release. “It also demonstrates that courts will not tolerate the cowboy mentality of policing that subjects our citizens to conditions of humiliation, degradation, and, in some tragic cases, violence.”
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The lawsuit was initiated by several Colorado residents, including Shawna Maloney, who detailed in testimony Monday that she felt intimidated by the troopers who used the maneuver on her family’s RV when they were on vacation in March 2018.
A trooper detained Maloney’s family while a K-9 unit was used to sniff for drugs around the exterior of the RV while three other troopers searched the interior. The 40-minute search did not produce drugs but left Maloney with an RV in disrepair with, as she testified, a damaged toilet, clothing strewn about, and other issues.