Yeah maybe. But it’s not a question of the officer protecting anyone or liberal trial lawyers letting some guy walk on a technicality. The sheriff’s office just literally took several thousand dollars off some guy without any justification and then later claimed that they didn’t know that wasn’t OK.
There are no deep intricacies of the law involved here. I live in the UK, and even I know the 4th amendment of the US constitution prohibits seizure of personal property without judicial process. Absent that judicial process, what happened was actually armed highway robbery. It’s much harder to spin your way out of a very straightforward fuck-up like that.
