Aiken Standard's top stories of 2022: No. 9 -- Pattern of warrantless bus searches on I-20 emerges

Dec. 23—Editor's note: The Aiken Standard is counting down its top 10 local stories for 2022 from Dec. 22-31. This article, originally reported by former staff writer Alexandra Koch, has been edited from its original form for brevity.

At 2:07 a.m. on June 19, 2018, an Aiken County Sheriff's Office deputy pulled over a commercial bus traveling east on Interstate 20 for allegedly crossing over the centerline. Within three minutes, two more deputies had arrived and a police dog was searching the bags of the two dozen passengers.

Deputy Daniel Puckett, who stopped the bus, would later admit he didn't know whether the bus driver or any passengers were engaged in any criminal activity. Yet, deputies used a knife to slice open and search a Maryland man's suitcase — conducting what a judge would later rule as an unconstitutional search.

Puckett and his colleagues, Deputy Robert Rodriguez and Lt. Michael Goodwin, told the man he was not free to leave and questioned him without reading him his rights — a violation of sheriff's office regulations.

Deputies threatened to arrest another passenger for public disorderly conduct, simply for questioning the legality of the officers' actions, court records show.

The traffic stop yielded 27 pounds of marijuana, 12,000 ecstasy pills, one arrest — and a court case revealing a troubling pattern of nonconsensual, warrantless drug investigations, an Uncovered investigation by the Aiken Standard found.

Reports of a dozen similar incidents emerged during legal proceedings in South Carolina's Second Judicial Circuit. Puckett, a long-serving K-9 officer, also testified to previously stopping and searching around 30 commercial buses for minor traffic violations.

On Dec. 16, 2021, Second Circuit Judge Clifton Newman tossed out the case after finding that deputies lacked probable cause to stop the bus and search its passengers. Though drugs were found, he ruled deputies had violated the passengers' civil rights in the process.

Video from the incident also appeared to contradict the deputy's stated reason for pulling over the bus in the first place.

The ruling ended the case, but hard questions linger about tactics employed by Aiken County deputies in combating drug-running along the interstate. Deputies appear to have used minor traffic violations as a pretense for conducting wholesale searches with little or no probable cause.

Allen Chaney, director of legal advocacy at ACLU of South Carolina, said seizing a multipassenger vehicle in this manner is problematic from a civil rights standpoint.

"Pulling over a bus for a traffic violation doesn't give you license to then detain that bus for an hour and then start searching through bags," Chaney said.

It remains unclear when and why Aiken County deputies began targeting commercial buses along the interstate, whether improper searches played a role in other stops, and what factor race may have played in these incidents. Reports indicate all passengers charged in the bus stops were Black; the deputies, predominantly white.

These questions prompted an Aiken Standard investigation into the Aiken County Sheriff's Office's handling and oversight of the traffic stops.

The newspaper filed several Freedom of Information Act requests to access dashcam footage, examined hundreds of legal documents and conducted multiple interviews to determine the extent and reasons behind the questionable searches.

Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt, a publicly elected official, declined multiple interview requests from the Aiken Standard regarding the case and pattern of warrantless searches.

The Aiken Standard's investigation into the department's overreach is part of a collaboration with The Post and Courier's Uncovered project, which aims to expose misconduct and questionable government actions across South Carolina. The Aiken Standard is among 18 news outlets partnering on Uncovered.

Reaction to ruling

Capt. Eric Abdullah, with the sheriff's office, said drug smuggling is a known problem on the interstate. He said commercial buses are attractive to smugglers because they are less regulated than other methods of transportation.

"You don't go through TSA to get on the bus," Abdullah said. "Your luggage is not searched, you're not searched, and your property is not being X-rayed. There have been times we've found passengers with firearms on a bus ... so you can easily get on a bus carrying a large quantity of illegal narcotics."

Second Circuit Solicitor Bill Weeks had a similar take. He said he doesn't agree with the judge's ruling and maintains "there was sufficient legal basis for the search."

The prosecution relied on a previous case, United States v. Hernandez, to support the stop and search, the court found. In that case, an officer who conducted stops as part of a DEA drug trafficking task force stopped a bus operated by a company that transported Hispanic passengers traveling throughout the United States and Mexico.

The cases, however, had significant differences, the judge found. The Hernandez ruling doesn't say whether the officer was routinely pulling over buses on the same route for minor traffic violations, as Puckett had done. Puckett didn't indicate the bus was coming from a known drug hub, nor did he have any indications of suspicious activity beyond the traffic infraction, the judge stated.

Knowing drugs are transported on the interstate, and that buses could be carrying drugs, is not probable cause to stop a vehicle, according to Seth W. Stoughton, a criminal justice professor at the University of South Carolina and former police officer.

"That's useful, that's certainly part of the analysis — but it's entirely speculative," Stoughton said, adding that the courts require officers to have specific information about the precise people or vehicles involved.

Chaney, of the ACLU, agreed. He said a hunch doesn't meet the threshold for justifying a stop under the Fourth Amendment.

"The fact that people traveling by bus don't have to go through TSA is not proof that a crime is, has, or is about to be committed," he said. "That's not a reasonable search or seizure, and that's exactly what the Fourth Amendment prohibits."

Abdullah said the sheriff's office will learn from the incident and incorporate those lessons into future training — but he challenged the notion that the case was a disappointment because it didn't yield a conviction. The search still kept dangerous drugs off the streets, he said.

"A little bit over [12,000] units of ecstasy and 27 pounds of marijuana were seized — the defendant is not getting that stuff back," he said. "So that's [12,000] pills that were going to go into a community somewhere along that line where that bus was going to stop, and we just took that poison off the street."

Chaney said that stance overlooks all of the unwarranted searches that fail to yield drugs or evidence of a crime. Those searches most often go unchallenged and remain outside the public's view because they don't enter the criminal justice system, he said.

"In cases where drugs aren't found, there's no incentive for citizens to bring claims that their constitutional rights were violated," he said. "They might file a complaint with the local police department, but it gets filed in the trash can."