Attorney and legal YouTuber John Bryan, Esq., host of The Civil Rights Lawyer, says a routine night in rural South Carolina turned into something much uglier when two wildlife officers stopped a hunter who, in Bryan’s telling, hadn’t broken the law and wasn’t even close to doing so.
John Bryan frames the case as a warning story about power, discretion, and what can happen when officers see a citizen’s property—especially a brand-new, expensive truck—as a prize instead of just transportation.
In the video, Bryan says the incident started on November 15, 2024, when South Carolina Department of Natural Resources officers Robert Thomas and Lance Corporal Zack Tatum were running a night-hunting sting using a decoy deer placed in a field along Coxmill Road in Taylors, South Carolina.
Bryan identifies the hunter as Shane Huffman, describing him as someone who had been hunting earlier, picked up dinner with his girlfriend, and was driving down the road when he noticed the decoy in the field.
In Bryan’s account, Huffman did what a lot of outdoorsmen would do when something looks off: he slowed down, stopped briefly, and used binoculars to look at the “deer,” then drove away after deciding it was fake.
That’s important because Bryan says the entire legal foundation of a “night hunting” charge depends on more than simply noticing a deer-shaped object at night, and he argues the bodycam footage shows the officers knew it too.
What The Bodycam Audio Shows Before The Stop
John Bryan plays and references bodycam clips that, in his view, are the most damaging part of the whole episode, because he says they capture the officers deciding to stop Huffman even while acknowledging they don’t have the key thing they’re supposed to be looking for.
Bryan highlights Officer Thomas saying, “He’s not got a light out, but he’s stopped in the road and he backed up. I’m going to stop him no matter what.” Bryan treats that line as the moment where the “investigation” stops being about law enforcement and starts looking, at least to him, like a decision made first with a target in mind and the legal theory built later.
He also points to an exchange where Officer Tatum asks about the headlights and Thomas answers “No,” which Bryan uses to argue they lacked the evidence needed to justify the stop under the very statute they were supposedly enforcing.
Bryan’s narrative is blunt: Huffman didn’t shine a spotlight, didn’t use headlights as a beam on the decoy, didn’t shoot, and didn’t handle his rifle while he looked – yet the officers still treated him as if he’d been caught mid-crime.
He also describes Huffman as a known hunter with a social media presence, mentioning a hunting page Bryan calls out by name, and he suggests that recognition may have added fuel to the officers’ excitement once they realized who they had stopped.
From there, Bryan says the traffic stop becomes a fast-moving escalation, with the officers shifting from casual questions into detaining and handcuffing Huffman, while repeatedly bringing up the presence of firearms in the vehicle.
The Traffic Stop And The “Night Hunting” Theory
John Bryan describes Huffman’s explanation to the officers as straightforward: he had just gotten pizza, he’d been hunting earlier, he had binoculars because he thought he saw a buck, and he suspected the deer was a decoy.
In the bodycam clip Bryan includes, Huffman appears to say he didn’t even know looking through binoculars could be considered illegal, and Bryan’s point is that it isn’t, at least not the way the officers were describing it in that moment.
This is where attorney Lori Murray of Columbia, South Carolina, enters the story, because Bryan interviews her and presents her as the defense lawyer who got the criminal charge dismissed and later helped file a civil lawsuit tied to the incident.
Murray tells Bryan that, under her understanding of South Carolina’s night-hunting framework, the key issue is artificial light combined with a loaded firearm, and she argues the officers admitted on their own cameras that Huffman did not shine any light at all.
Bryan returns to a section of bodycam where an officer says to Huffman, “You can’t stop and look at deer with a gun in the truck,” and Bryan treats that as the kind of made-up roadside rule that sounds “official” in the moment but collapses when you compare it to the actual elements required to prove the charge.
Murray also tells Bryan that even if night hunting for deer is illegal, night hunting for coyotes can be legal, and she emphasizes that the officers still needed a lawful basis to initiate the stop in the first place, which she says they didn’t have if they never observed the essential “shining” behavior.
You can feel Bryan’s frustration here, because he keeps circling back to what he calls the ordinary human behavior at the center of the case: a driver sees an object, slows down, looks, then leaves – something that, by itself, shouldn’t trigger handcuffs, charges, and a vehicle seizure.
“Would You Tow The Truck?” And The Part That Sounds Like Dollar Signs
John Bryan’s strongest allegation is not just that Huffman was stopped or even charged, but that the officers wanted his truck and gear, and he says the bodycam audio supports that interpretation in a way that’s hard to hand-wave away.
Bryan plays a clip where one officer says, “Would you tow the truck? So, he just bought that truck and it’d be nice to put that sucker on a roll back, but that’s up to you,” and Bryan describes the tone as excited, almost celebratory, like they’d stumbled onto a jackpot.
He also includes officers talking about the case as a “once in a” moment and “career-making,” which Bryan frames as a dangerous mindset when you’re dealing with discretionary power that can cost someone thousands of dollars, not to mention their freedom.
Murray reinforces Bryan’s point in the interview by saying the truck was brand new with paper tags and the gear was expensive, and she says, in her view, they were “seeing dollar signs” when they looked into the vehicle.
Bryan also focuses on what he says is a pattern of officers muting or turning off bodycams, and he presents that as its own red flag, because it creates a suspicious gap where the public can’t hear what was said at key moments.
He claims that at one point an officer appears to forget to mute, and Bryan says the audience gets a rare, unfiltered listen to the kind of private conversation that officers normally keep off the record, including talk about keeping the truck and how “great” the case might be for them.
Even if you’re someone who normally gives agencies the benefit of the doubt, that kind of audio – officers discussing towing a brand-new truck like it’s a trophy – tends to land badly, because it makes enforcement feel personal, and not in a good way.
How The Charges Got Dropped And What The Lawyer Says Happened Next
According to John Bryan’s interview, Lori Murray says she requested discovery, watched the bodycam, and quickly concluded the state’s theory didn’t match what the video showed.
Murray describes it as one of the easiest criminal cases she’d handled, not because it was trivial, but because she believed the evidence undercut the accusation from the beginning, especially with officers acknowledging the lack of spotlighting.
She tells Bryan that the case bounced between different court levels, and she describes pushing back against any offer that would require Huffman to plead to “spotlighting” when she says the video shows he didn’t spotlight at all.
In Murray’s retelling to Bryan, she told the prosecutor to watch the footage, and she says that after more back-and-forth – including what she describes as an attempt to downgrade the court venue – the charge was dismissed without the case ever needing a full courtroom fight.
Murray also tells Bryan that Huffman had to pay $2,500 related to the truck after it was seized, and she says that money was returned once the case went away, along with the hunting equipment that had been taken.
Bryan points out that, in his view, that’s still an enormous burden for an ordinary person, because even a temporary seizure can wreck schedules, finances, and peace of mind, especially when the underlying criminal accusation is hanging over you.
Murray says she did not see an apology, and Bryan adds that the lack of accountability is exactly why a civil rights lawsuit was filed, with Bryan presenting it as an attempt to force answers that the agency won’t volunteer.
Why This Case Hits A Nerve For Hunters And Regular Drivers
John Bryan’s broader message is that you don’t need to be a career criminal to end up in the gears of the system; sometimes all it takes is being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong officer, and in this case, Bryan argues, the “wrong” thing might have been a shiny new truck and expensive gear.
He paints wildlife enforcement as an area with real authority but less public attention, and he suggests that’s exactly where abuses can grow, because fewer people are watching and fewer headlines are generated when the target is a hunter on a country road.
Murray, in her interview with Bryan, makes the argument in a more everyday way, saying people stop to look at deer all the time, and she mocks the idea that binoculars would magically turn normal behavior into a crime.
That’s where this story leaves a sour taste, because even if you believe in strong conservation enforcement, most people also believe there has to be a clear line between enforcing the law and stretching the law until it snaps just to justify a stop, a charge, or a seizure.
John Bryan ends by urging viewers to share the footage and follow the lawsuit for updates, and whether someone agrees with every word he says or not, the bodycam clips he highlights make one point hard to ignore: when officers talk about a citizen’s property like it’s a prize, the public stops seeing enforcement and starts seeing temptation.
