Deputy Joel Babb of the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office stopped Alek Schott’s Ford F-250 on northbound Interstate 35 south of San Antonio, Texas, at about 11:15 a.m. on March 16, 2022. According to Schott’s federal complaint, Babb told him it would be a warning, not a ticket, and said, “I don’t give tickets. I give warnings.” The stop ran more than an hour, and three deputies spent about 40 minutes searching the truck. They found nothing. On Sept. 28, 2026, the Institute for Justice, the law firm representing Schott, announced that a federal jury in San Antonio had held Bexar County liable and awarded him $76.
A warning leaves no ticket to fight
The complaint quotes Babb giving one reason for the stop: Schott had drifted over the fog line. Texas Transportation Code § 545.060 tells drivers on a roadway with marked lanes to drive “as nearly as practical” within a single lane and not to leave it unless the move can be made safely. That standard is the legal footing for this kind of stop, and it rests on a factual claim the deputy makes at the roadside. IJ says the evidence at trial showed Schott never crossed the line, and its case page says Schott’s own dashcam footage shows no drift.
Choosing a warning changes who can check that claim. A ticket can be contested in traffic court, where the officer has to describe the lane violation under oath. A written warning carries no charge, so nothing goes before a judge unless the driver sues. Schott says he tried the cheaper route first: in IJ’s release, he says he complained to the Sheriff’s Office, that the department reviewed it and saw no violation, and that he was told to sue if he had a problem.
Two Supreme Court rules and a 20-minute wait for a dog
The Supreme Court permits the first half of this. In Whren v. United States (1996), a unanimous Court held that a stop is reasonable when the officer has probable cause of a traffic violation, whatever else the officer hoped to find. A deputy can be fishing for drugs as long as the lane violation really happened.
The second half is tighter. In Rodriguez v. United States (2015), a 6-3 majority led by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg held that authority for a traffic stop ends when the tasks tied to the violation are, or reasonably should have been, finished, and that a dog sniff is not one of those tasks. Holding a driver for a sniff takes reasonable suspicion of something else…