A Starke County deputy is being sued for a search he conducted in July, when he stopped three people who were on the way to Pokemon GO Fest in Illinois. The ACLU of Indiana filed the suit this week on the grounds that the deputy violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects people from unconstitutional searches.
Nicholas Tyo, Steven Stanley, and Drew Landes were on the way to Illinois from Ohio in July when they were pulled over by Deputy Ethan Biggs. The suit claims that Biggs demanded everyone’s driver’s license, then asked if they had any drugs in the car.
The suit says Biggs “proceeded to lengthen the traffic stop” by conducting a non-consensual search of the car, with a drug-sniffing police dog. The suit says Biggs patted down each man and searched both the inside and outside of the car.
The suit claims that there was no justification for the search and that no evidence of drugs or criminal activity was found, and that despite Biggs’ claim that the men were speeding as cause for the stop, he did not give them men a ticket. The Fourth Amendment does not allow for a traffic stop to be converted into an intrusive drug investigation, said the ACLU.
“Minor traffic stops should not be pretexts for invasive searches,” said Gavin M. Rose, ACLU of Indiana Senior Staff Attorney. “This is police overreach in an effort to discover contraband without any reason to believe that anything unlawful was afoot.”
