Gregory Bombard was driving through his hometown of St. Albans, Vermont, enjoying a coffee and a cigarette. He committed no crime — not even a minor traffic violation. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting in a jail cell. Bombard’s alleged crime? Cursing at a cop and giving him the finger during a traffic stop — conduct that is squarely protected by the First Amendment. A federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed, and the dash cam footage has been released.
Category Archives: Vehicular Crimes
One Tiny Problem With This Million Dollar Coke Bust
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The Indiana State Police performed a traffic stop on a tractor trailer. Inside the truck they found around two million dollars in cocaine. Here’s the bodycam footage. But will this seizure hold up in court?
Press Release from Indiana State Police:
Thursday, May 26, 2022, at approximately 4:00 p.m., an Indiana State Trooper stopped a tractor-trailer at the thirty-seven mile marker eastbound on Interstate 70 for a routine compliance inspection. The driver of the tractor-trailer was identified as Leonardo Hernandez, age 38, of Miami, Florida, with one passenger in the vehicle. During the conversation with the driver and passenger, criminal indicators were observed, and a consent search revealed approximately forty-four pounds of suspected cocaine. Leonardo Hernandez and Rolando Bermudez Acevedo were taken into custody and transported to the Putnam County Jail.
The tractor-trailer was enroute from Phoenix, Arizona, to Indianapolis, Indiana.
The estimated street value of the cocaine is one million dollars.
Original Video From Cop Cam here.
Door Dasher CAUGHT in Fishing Expedition
Cops in Wisconsin successfully nabbed some teenagers engaged in Door-Dashing. Originally a speeding stop, the officer quickly pivoted to a drug investigation, and basically went on a fishing expedition in an effort to find any reason at all to arrest them.
Family in Rental Car Held at Gunpoint After False Report From AI Surveillance
A Wisconsin family on vacation in San Diego was pulled over by police in Oceanside, California, after their rental car was mistakenly flagged by the town’s automated stolen car reporting system. They were ordered out of their vehicle at gunpoint and treated as dangerous criminals. As it turns out, the rental car company had neglected to withdraw an older report that the rented vehicle was stolen. The town’s automated camera system notified police of the vehicle’s whereabouts, leading to this interaction.
Here’s another video I did on the same general legal issue:
Here’s another video I did on the same general legal issue:
“Deputy of the Month” Gets CHARGED + 5 More in Same Department!
Remember the super-friendly female deputy in Camden County, Georgia, caught on her dash cam attacking a woman at a traffic stop? Well, it’s time for an update. Even after this incident, she was named “Deputy of the Month.” But then she was fired and indicted by a grand jury. But that’s not all the problems currently being faced by the Camden County Sheriff’s Office.
The “Deputy of the Month” Facebook post:
Media report on Deputy Newman.
Media report on the deputy who shot Leonard Cole and other pending prosecutions in Camden County.
Can “Sovereign Citizens” Win in Court? | Florida Traffic Stop
One of the most common questions I get asked is, what’s the deal with the sovereign citizen videos. Do these guys ever win in court? Here’s a brand new one that just made the news in Volusia County, Florida. The bodycam footage was released by the sheriff there, showing two people arrested after claiming essentially that laws don’t apply to them as sovereign citizens. Is there anything to this?
This happened in Florida. Florida is in the 11th federal circuit. So to find the applicable federal constitutional law, you look first to the U.S. Supreme Court and then to the 11th Circuit. Then elsewhere. The federal courts in Florida and the 11th Circuit have addressed sovereign citizen arguments multiple times. One recent case out of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Ford v. Antonides, issued in October of 2022, alleges basically these same facts.
There, the plaintiff, Tyree Ford, filed a pro se civil rights lawsuit from the Lee County Jail, alleging that he was unlawfully arrested after a traffic stop and seeking 2 million dollars in damages. The Court wrote that:
Instead of alleging facts showing that the stop of his car was somehow improper (leading to a claim for false arrest or false imprisonment), Plaintiff bases his claims against Defendant Antonides on an argument that he was immune from the traffic stop she initiated (and that eventually led to his arrest) because he displayed a sign on his car informing her that he was a “Traveler – Not for hire. Private Property.” (Doc. 1 at 6). This argument is similar to those espoused by self-proclaimed “sovereign citizens,” as explained in a 2019 law review article:
The most common type of Sovereign Citizen claim encountered by local and state police, as well as federal border patrol agents, is the “right to travel.” Citing the Constitution, Supreme Court cases, and a plethora of other sources, Sovereign Citizens believe they are not required to have driver’s licenses, license plates, vehicle registration, or to stop at border or sobriety checkpoints. Similar to other claims, Sovereign Citizens discussing the “right to travel” place special emphasis on the words being used.
They differentiate between a driver and a traveler; an automobile and a motor vehicle; commercial and non- commercial; and public versus private conveyances. Once a Sovereign Citizen claims that he or she is merely a traveler or traveling, he or she then uses federal and state cases to support the “right to travel.” Sovereign Citizens also believe the right to travel constitutes a complete bar on government interference with travel in the absence of probable cause or evidence that a victim has been harmed.
These types of claims-that a plaintiff is entitled to different treatment as a “sovereign citizen”-are routinely rejected by federal courts as frivolous. See, e.g., United States v. Sterling, 738 F.3d 228, 233 n.1 (11th Cir. 2013) (noting that so-called “sovereign citizens” are individuals who believe they are not subject to courts’ jurisdiction and that courts have summarily rejected their legal theories as frivolous); United States v. Benabe, 654 F.3d 753, 761-67 (7th Cir. 2011) (describing the conduct of a “sovereign citizen” and collecting cases rejecting the group’s claims as frivolous, and recommending that “sovereign citizen” arguments “be rejected summarily, however they are presented.”); Reed v. Jones, No. 4:21CV3051, 2021 WL 2913023, at *3 (D. Neb. July 12, 2021) (“sovereign citizen” argument that motor-vehicle registration and licensing laws do not apply to plaintiff rejected as frivolous); Trevino v. Florida, 687 Fed.Appx. 861, 862 (11th Cir. 2017) (per curiam) (affirming dismissal of 1983 action based on sovereign citizens as frivolous and noting that if those theories challenged the conviction, habeas was the proper avenue of relief).
Nothing alleged in Plaintiff’s complaint even remotely suggests that he is entitled to relief against Defendant Antonides under recognized theories of relief. And, as noted, Plaintiff’s sovereign citizen argument has been soundly rejected by federal courts. Accordingly, all claims against Defendant Antonides are dismissed from this action as frivolous and for failure to state a claim on which relief may be granted. 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2)(B)(i), (ii).
There are many more cases just like this using a lot of the same language. Every one of them dismissing the arguments as frivolous and quickly moving on. And that’s just the 11th Circuit. It’s the same around the country.
So to answer your question, no there’s nothing to it. That’s not to say that I don’t think that Thomas Jefferson is rolling in his grave at the idea of the government requiring license plates and licenses to operate his carriage. But it’s the reality we live in.
Cop Charged With Murder | Shoots “Suspicious Paint” Suspect
A LaSalle, Colorado police officer has been charged with second degree murder after he shot a man in a dollar store parking lot, during an investigation about a car’s suspicious paint job. It was the officer’s third day of training with that police department. Can a police officer shoot a man attempting to flee a suspicious paint job investigation?
Here’s the uncensored use of force clip:
Felony Stop of Creepy Cop
A police officer was pulled over in Wyoming, Ohio, after his wife, or ex-wife, called the cops on him after an argument following their attendance at a Halloween party. The woman told dispatchers she and Michael Matheson, a sergeant with the St. Bernard Police Department, had gotten into an argument. She additionally told them Matheson was leaving in his truck, intoxicated and possibly armed with his duty weapon.
Councilman Controls Cops | “He’s an A-hole”
Never forget that interactions with the police are interactions with the government. Many times the employers of police officers give the orders and guide policy and practice. On the state level, those could be career bureaucrats. But many times on the city and county levels, those are usually politicians. And never forget that voters tend to elect politicians who are often incompetent, tyrannical, or even criminal. In this video you’ll see a citycouncilman who personally meddles in law enforcement activities for his friends, his family, as well as himself.
Media report from The Georgia Virtue.
Media report no. 2.
Media report no. 3.
A Bus Driver’s Nightmare | It Could Happen to Anyone
If you think that being falsely arrested can’t happen to you, then you have to watch this video. This video shows my client being arrested for DUI even though she was stone cold sober. This can, and does, happen to innocent people across the country. Here you will see an egregious example of this happening, as it plays out in real time on the officer’s bodycam.
My client, Yolanda Elliott, was a bus driver for the City of Bluefield, West Virginia. Mrs. Elliott is a completely innocent, hardworking good person. She was a bus driver for the actual city that ended up arresting her. She had then, and still has, a CDL license to drive large buses and trucks. Little did she know that when she showed up for work that day, on October 28, 2022, she would be pulled over while driving a city bus, accused of running a red light, and then pulled out of her bus and forced to perform a bunch of circus tricks, while the passenger of her bus watched.
Here’s the “Scary Sign Arrest” video, also from Bluefield, WV Police Department.