Mississippi law enforcement officers wrongly seized hundreds of thousands of dollars from a man after pulling him over, the state’s appeals court ruled on Oct. 8.
While officers said a series of facts supported their belief that Chung, who was found with $225,000, was a drug money courier, none of the facts actually demonstrated that Chung was connected to drug activity and Chung provided plausible explanations for each point, judges said.
During the traffic stop on Sept. 23, 2020, officers said their suspicion was raised in part because Chung spent three days off the road in California and, one officer has testified, the goal of commercial truck drivers is “to make as much money as they possibly can” and they “want to be on the road as much as they can.” However, Chung lives in California and must be off the road for 30 hours after spending 70 hours driving.
Officers also said it was suspicious that Chung carried the money in envelopes with $5,000 each. Nick McLendon, a police chief in Mississippi, said during the trial in the case that the way the money was stored made it easy to count for quick exchanges and supported the position that Chung was a drug courier.
“However, there is nothing criminal about Chung’s preferred method of saving or his desire to have immediate access to the money he earned,” Judge Latrice A. Westbrooks wrote for the majority. “Chung chose to keep his money in his possession and control. It was readily available to him because it was kept in the place where he resided: his truck. Although this method may seem unconventional, it does not make him a drug courier.”
A trial court concluded that the evidence in the case showed that Chung was in contact with a known drug trafficker, but the evidence actually only showed that he gave officers a phone number for another individual and that that number had been in touch with a trafficker being tracked by the Drug Enforcement Agency, Westbrooks said.
She noted that officers found no solid link between purported traffickers and Chung and also did not uncover evidence of drugs or weapons in Chung’s truck after he consented to a search.
“To take these remote connections and conclude that Chung is a drug courier, without more, would be pure speculation,” Westbrooks said.
That means the state improperly seized the funds under Mississippi’s forfeiture statute, which allows seizure of money if the money is used or intended to be used in violation of drug laws, the majority said.
Chief Judge Donna M. Barnes and Judges Deborah McDonald, Joel Smith, and David Neil McCarty joined Westbrooks.
The majority reversed the trial court’s judgment and ordered the money returned to Chung.
In a dissent, Judge Jack L. Wilson said that in the case, “there was sufficient circumstantial evidence for a rational trier of fact to infer and find by a preponderance of the evidence that the $225,000 cash found in a duffle bag in Chung’s commercial motor vehicle was the product of or intended for use in connection with drug trafficking.”
Wilson said that evidence included Chung having a Bank of America bank account but keeping most of his money in cash.
Judges Virginia C. Carlton, Anthony N. Lawrence III, and John H. Emfinger backed the dissent.
Lawyers for Chung and the state did not respond to requests for comment.
