It sounds like the opening of the Netflix hit movie, “Rebel Ridge.” But it happened in real life and the consequences are still playing out in the Nevada courts.
On February 19, 2021, retired Marine Stephen Lara was making the 1,400 mile drive from Lubbock, Texas to Portola, a small California town near Reno, Nevada, where his teenage daughters lived with his ex-wife. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Lara, now 42, was laid off from his hospital systems administrator job in California and moved in with his parents in Lubbock to save money–and to save up for a house.
Lara had driven this four-day round trip dozens of times and it had become almost routine. This time, however, he was pulled over by the Nevada Highway Patrol on I-80 near Sparks, Nevada—about an hour from Reno–ostensibly for following and passing a tanker truck too closely. He wasn’t issued a traffic ticket or warning, let alone arrested or charged with a crime.
Yet the 90 minute encounter ended with the officers seizing Lara's life savings–some $86,900 in cash he had in a Ziploc bag secured by his daughters’ hair ties–and sending the money to the federal Drug Enforcement Agency for potential “civil forfeiture.” What that means is that despite the fact Lara was not charged with a crime, the feds could legally keep his money, kicking back $69,520 of it to the Nevada Highway Patrol as a sort of finder’s fee.
More than six months later, Lara got his cash back—but only after The Institute for Justice (IJ), a libertarian not-for-profit law firm which fights what it sees as government abuses, sued the DEA on his behalf. Now, with IJ still representing him pro bono (for free), he’s asking Nevada courts to rule that the state’s constitution, which protects property rights, bars the Nevada Highway Patrol from participating in the “equitable sharing” civil forfeiture program run by the feds–something almost all states now do.
Earlier this year, Lara won a preliminary round in his Nevada case when a trial judge rejected the highway patrol’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A trial is scheduled for next June. If he ultimately wins, it could set an important precedent and inspire legal challenges in other states.
From 2000 to 2019, by IJ’s count, the feds sent a whopping $8.8 billion in civil forfeiture payments to state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies that had seized assets under the joint program.
When Lara was being pulled over by the highway patrol, he thought it might be because there was something wrong with his rental car, maybe expired tags. But the patrol officer politely explained that while “it appears you’re trying to drive safely” the NHP was waging a public information campaign about little-known traffic violations. And Lara, he said, was following the truck too closely and had passed too closely.
The officer then asked Lara to get out of his vehicle. Muscular, with close-cropped hair and service in both Afghanistan and Iraq under his belt, the ex-marine played it by the........