Tennessee Cops Harass Old Lady After Mistaking Buckeye Bumper Sticker for Pot Leaf Bumper Sticker



Reason – by Mike Riggs

If you thought the war on drugs couldn’t get any dumber, then you aren’t using your imagination. Last week, the former president of the Dallas-Fort Worth Ohio State Alumni Club was pulled over in Tennessee while driving from her mother-in-law’s funeral in Ohio back to Texas. The reason? Tennessee police mistook the Buckeyes sticker on her ride for a pot leaf sticker, and thought it meant she was trafficking drugs (because people do that). The Columbus Dispatch reports:

They were in the westbound lanes of I-40, a few miles east of Memphis, when a black police SUV with flashing lights pulled them over, Bonnie Jonas-Boggioni said. A second black SUV soon pulled up behind the first one.

“Knowing I wasn’t speeding, I couldn’t imagine why,” she said.

Two officers approached, one on each side of the car.

“They were very serious,” she said. “They had the body armor and the guns.”

Because the couple’s two schnauzers were barking furiously, one of the officers had Jonas-Boggioni exit the car so he could hear her better.

“What are you doing with a marijuana sticker on your bumper?” he asked her.

She explained that it is actually a Buckeye leaf decal, just like the ones that Ohio State players are given to put on their helmets to mark good plays.

“He looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language,” she said.

At that point, Boggioni got out of the car to show that he was wearing a commemorative sweatshirt from the 2002 national-championship season, complete with a Buckeye leaf.

The officer then explained that someone from outside his jurisdiction — apparently another officer — had spotted the leaf sticker and thought it might indicate that the car was carrying marijuana, Jonas-Boggioni said.

Before they let her go on her way, the officers advised Jonas-Boggioni to remove the decal from her car.

“I said, ‘You mean in Tennessee?’ and he said, ‘No, permanently.’

Jonas-Boggioni refused to take down the sticker, saying, “This little old lady is no drug dealer.” Good for her, standing up to those idiots. And if it had been a pot leaf? Turns out that’s not reason enough to pull someon over, according to a spokeswoman for the West Tennessee Drug Task Force. Perhaps she should tell her officers?

http://reason.com/blog/2013/02/15/tennessee-cops-harass-old-lady-after-mis

13 thoughts on “Tennessee Cops Harass Old Lady After Mistaking Buckeye Bumper Sticker for Pot Leaf Bumper Sticker

  1. “[The officer] had spotted the leaf sticker and thought it might indicate that the car was carrying marijuana.” Yeah right, drug dealers like to call attention to themselves with signs that say DRUGS ON BOARD (like those dumb BABY ON BOARD signs)!

  2. I see plenty of people driving around with marijuana (not buckeye) leaf bumper stickers all the time. There’s no law against it.

  3. More idiots with guns and badges. Just another day in Police State America….where the Bill of Rights does not exist anymore.

  4. Incredible that those tasked with “enforcing the law” know so little about it. Until that changes, nothing else will.

  5. Call them what they really are!!! BONEHEADS!!! Remove the sticker of a buckeye leaf? After they had been told what it is? They probably said that to cover for their ignorance and stupidity…throw their weight around, swagger a little bit, pose and strut like they are some kind of regal authority. They’re AGENTS to us, the PRINCIPALS.

  6. how is this a lawful action on the part of the police??? It is not illegal to display a pot leaf on your vehicle. I don’t care what they “thought”. Unless they had “cause” this stop was illegal, period. The cops are supposed to stop civilians when a crime/infraction has been committed, not when they “think” someone might have done something. If this type of justification stands up in court, no one is safe anymore from erroneous prosecution, which can ruin your life and drain your finances.

  7. The real reason why these people were pulled over was because these cops smelled potential profits. If, by a very slim chance, they did find drugs, the DEA would have given them a big pat on the back and an envelope with their take in it. Yes, it’s true, the police do profit off of drug busts. Ever since the war on drugs was escalated in the early 80s, the DEA has been sharing a percentage of the profits by paying police departments for every drug bust they make, and guess what all police know to be the very easiest drug bust in the nation? Marijuana. People who possess marijuana are the least likely to put up a fight. Cops love all the easy money they have made off the stuff.

  8. In other news, an Icthus automobile sticker was mistaken by officers of the Tennessee Highway Patrol for the symbol of a nuclear bomb.

    Assuming there was an active nuclear weapon on board the late-model SUV, they called Federal NIST and FBI authorities to report the incident.

    I’ll leave the rest to the reader’s imagination.

  9. The death threat the police posed was insane. To send armed men to cruse the highways observing passing bumper stickers for indications of criminality requires a clown car not a suv.

  10. That cop’s full of sh*t. He pulled her over because he hadn’t met his quota for the month and she was an easy target. Krispy Kream must have been closed.

  11. There is a hilarious audio of a donut molester getting high on weed for the first time and then calling 911 because he is freaking out. Probably didn’t have too many brain cells to spare after all that only following orders.

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