According to the US Court of Appeals, driving with lotsa cash is against the law.
Let’s do a quick check of the raincoaster situation:
No driver’s license. No car. No money.
Yay, I’m immune!
from The Newspaper, via Fark.
A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that if a motorist is carrying large sums of money, it is automatically subject to confiscation. In the case entitled, “United States of America v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit took that amount of cash away from Emiliano Gomez Gonzolez, a man with a “lack of significant criminal history” neither accused nor convicted of any crime.
On May 28, 2003, a Nebraska state trooper signaled
Gonzolez to pull over his rented Ford Taurus on Interstate 80. The trooper intended to issue a speeding ticket, but noticed the Gonzolez‘s name was not on the rental contract. The trooper then proceeded to question Gonzolez — who did not speak English well — and search the car. The trooper found a cooler containing $124,700 in cash, which he confiscated. A trained drug sniffing dog barked at the rental car and the cash. For the police, this was all the evidence needed to establish a drug crime that allows the force to keep the seized money.
Associates of Gonzolez testified in court that they had pooled their life savings to purchase a refrigerated truck to start a produce business. Gonzolez flew on a one-way ticket to Chicago to buy a truck, but it had sold by the time he had arrived. Without a credit card of his own, he had a third-party rent one for him. Gonzolez hid the money in a cooler to keep it from being noticed and stolen. He was scared when the troopers began questioning him about it. There was no evidence disputing Gonzolez‘s story.
Yesterday the Eighth Circuit summarily dismissed Gonzolez‘s story. It overturned a lower court ruling that had found no evidence of drug activity, stating, “We respectfully disagree and reach a different conclusion… Possession of a large sum of cash is ‘strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.”
Judge Donald Lay found the majority’s reasoning faulty and issued a strong dissent.
“Notwithstanding the fact that claimants seemingly suspicious activities were reasoned away with plausible, and thus presumptively trustworthy, explanations which the government failed to contradict or rebut, I note that no drugs, drug paraphernalia, or drug records were recovered in connection with the seized money,” Judge Lay wrote. “There is no evidence claimants were ever convicted of any drug-related crime, nor is there any indication the manner in which the currency was bundled was indicative of
drug use or distribution.”“Finally, the mere fact that the canine alerted officers to the presence of drug residue in a rental car, no doubt driven by dozens, perhaps scores, of patrons during the course of a given year, coupled with the fact that the alert came from the same location where the currency was discovered, does little to connect the money to a controlled substance offense,” Judge Lay Concluded.
The full text of the ruling is available in a 36k PDF file at the source link below.
Source:
US v. $124,700 (US Court of Appeals, Eighth Circuit, 8/19/2006)
Re-posted from another forum. Sorry if you’ve already read it; go on to 
From the Archive: 
of the gene pool. Mount Pleasant runs south along Main from Dysfunction Junction at Broadway right up to the peak of the Mount itself, which up around King Ed, in Queen E Park. Broadway is actually Ninth avenue and King Ed is twenty-fifth, but nobody calls them that; it would be like calling John Wayne “Marion.” It’s a nice, working-class place with neat little old houses, maybe in need of a coat of paint or two, and big, rambling Victorians with truly elaborate gardens and lowrise apartment buildings full of Filipino immigrants and poor families who all gather on the patio at the cocktail hour for a little ballroom dancing. It’s quite a sight, I tell you; looks like a really, really casual wedding every single night. Jeans and sweats are good enough for most, and some of the youngest have been known to waltz in Speedos, at least when the sprinkler is going on the lawn. The middle-agers are the best dancers, but the expression on their faces makes them look like radio-controlled evil clones or something; lighten up people!
They say if you stand at the door of the Ritz-Carleton long enough you will see everyone on earth pass by. Well I say if you sit at an outside table at the Mount Pleasant Starbucks long enough you will see everyone in the neighborhood at least once, and probably at least one person you haven’t seen in twenty years, no matter where you’re from. It is the centre of the cosmos, at least on a very microcosmetic scale. There I learned all about how Pugs aren’t the snotty little wretches they seem to be; a woman tied her tiny FooFoo to one of the tables and the little critter was so game and friendly that it dragged the table thirty feet around the corner so it could say hi to everyone. Remember, this thing is the size of an ankle boot.
raincoaster 