A Bexar County sheriff’s deputy stopped Alek Schott’s truck on Interstate 35 south of San Antonio at about 11:15 a.m. on March 16, 2022, and told him he had been “drifting over that fog line pretty hard,” according to the complaint Schott filed in federal court. Schott, a Houston-area businessman driving home from a customer meeting near Carrizo Springs, had his own dashcam running, and Texas Public Radio reported that evidence at trial showed he never crossed the line. On Sept. 28, a federal jury in San Antonio found the county liable for violating his Fourth Amendment rights and awarded him $76, KSAT reported, one dollar for each of the 76 minutes he was held.
Photo: formulanone / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0. Interstate 35 at the I-37 interchange in San Antonio; not the stop location.
What the deputy said on his own camera
The deputy, Joel Babb, worked in the sheriff’s Criminal Interdiction Unit. The complaint quotes him telling Schott it would be a warning, not a ticket, and that the unit looks for “human smuggling, drug smuggling, and all those things like that.” Schott refused a search. About 20 minutes into the stop, the Institute for Justice says, Babb called a drug dog. Deputy Martin Molina, the handler, reported an alert. Three deputies then went through the truck for roughly 40 minutes and found no drugs or other evidence of a crime, according to the complaint. The written warning cited failure to maintain a single lane and carried the notation “No Search.”
The dog scratched the truck, and the complaint says Bexar County paid $7,268.46 for the damage. Schott did not sue over it. KSAT reported that Babb told another deputy the truck was one he had been looking for and had been tracking, and the complaint quotes him on camera saying of stops like this one, “nine times out of ten, this is what happens.” KSAT, citing court records, reported that license plate readers tracked the truck driving south toward the border and back, a pattern deputies flagged as suspicious.
How one stop made the county pay
A county is not liable under federal civil rights law just because its employee did something unconstitutional. Under Monell v. Department of Social Services, a 1978 Supreme Court decision, the plaintiff has to show that a county policy or custom caused the violation. That is why Schott’s complaint did not stop at Babb. Its fourth claim targets the county and Sheriff Javier Salazar for what it calls a policy and custom of using traffic stops to search drivers without suspicion of a crime, and it asks for a declaration and a permanent injunction in addition to damages, including $1 in nominal damages…