Before putting the cuffs on Rodel Rodis, the Ninth Circuit says the cops should’ve asked him more questions about his fishy-looking $100 bill.
No doubt.
Because Rodis, it turns out, is a San Francisco lawyer — one who has already helped sue the government for violating people’s rights. So it doesn’t surprise us that he wasn’t the type to forgive and forget when the police brought him down to the station so they could make a phone call to investigate the bill — one that, as it turned out, was perfectly legit.
“The decision is just so satisfying because of what was at stake,” Rodis said Tuesday afternoon, hours after a Ninth Circuit panel published a decision (.pdf) saying he can go ahead and sue two police officers for violating his civil rights. “Any one of us can have a $20 bill, a $50 bill, and we can’t all have a counterfeit detector pen to make sure all the bills we have are genuine.”
Even a pen like that couldn’t keep Rodis, who does mostly civil and immigration work, from arrest back in 2003, though. When he went to pay for “a few items” with a $100 bill, the cashier examined it for authenticity. Because it was really old and appeared to have an unusual texture, she called in her manager. While Rodis paid with another, apparently normal-looking $100, the manager compared the first fishy-looking one to others in the store’s safe, and tested it with the store’s counterfeit detector pen — which indicated the money was real. Still, the manager remained suspicious and called the police, so Rodis waited.
The officers examined the bill and “concluded it was probably counterfeit,” Tuesday’s opinion says, but decided they needed an expert opinion from the Secret Service. Before getting that, though, they arrested Rodis, “because the officers believed it would be easiest to continue the investigation from the police station.”
Details here from Legal Pad vial CalLaw.com.