North Las Vegas affirms $300K settlement for lawsuit that alleged warrantless search
The North Las Vegas City Council has approved a $300,000 settlement for a man awaiting a murder trial, who accused police of conducting a warrantless search during an unrelated shooting investigation.
The federal civil rights lawsuit resolution was approved as part of Wednesday’s council consent agenda — a cluster of items decided with a single vote with no public discussion unless an official pulls it aside for further debate.
Officials wrote in the agenda that attorneys working with the North Las Vegas advised it that settling “was in the best interest of the City” to “eliminate any potential risk of an adverse verdict and to save money on further defending this matter.”
The settlement was negotiated, according to the city, which declined further comment.
On July 26, 2016, North Las Vegas police responded to reports of gunshots in a neighborhood near Martin Luther King and Pecos Road, according to an arrest report.
They pulled over Raymond Padilla in the area. The pickup truck he was driving matched the description of one of three vehicles the 911 caller said fled the scene.
Padilla told officers he didn’t have a driver’s license, so they ordered him to step out, cuffed and searched him, police said.
They then found a handgun he wasn’t allowed to possess in the center console, police said.
Padilla hand wrote the lawsuit from the Clark County Detention Center. He alleged that police tampered with evidence to make him look guilty.
“By placing the weapon in plain sight officers robbed the plaintiff of his defense that it was not his vehicle and he had no knowledge the weapon was in the vehicle,” he wrote.
A jury found him guilty of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person. Padilla appealed the conviction, which was later reversed by the Nevada Supreme Court.
‘Deserves to be compensated’
“Once the officers conducted the ‘Terry frisk’ of Padilla and discovered no weapons on his person, however, any reasonable suspicion that Padilla was dangerous no longer existed,” the Supreme Court wrote in a 2019 reversal order.
The order added: “We conclude that the officer’s intrusion into the center console of Padilla’s vehicle was not a protective sweep, but an unconstitutional warrantless search and the district court erred in failing to suppress the firearm evidence.”
Attorney Lucas Gaffney represented Padilla in his successful appeal.
“Mr. Padilla certainly deserves to be compensated for the time he spent in jail fighting to regain his freedom,” he wrote to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The Metropolitan Police Department later linked Padilla to the killing of Mark Santee, which occurred exactly three months before he was pulled over by North Las Vegas police.
Santee, a security guard, was shot and killed as he tried to thwart a robbery in a Las Vegas construction site.
Padilla, 51, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in late March, but quickly thereafter indicated he wanted to withdraw the agreement, according to District Court records.
A hearing to evaluate the withdrawal request was slated for July 29, court records show.
A listed attorney could not be reached for comment.
Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com Follow on X @rickytwrites.
