Two men, a grade school administrator and his friend, were driving around western New York during the Easter school break. One morning, they stopped for breakfast at a local cafe in a small town. There, they saw a young girl dressed in her Easter finery.
The men decided to treat the girl by getting their Easter bunny mask from their van. So, one of the men retrieved the mask, put the bunny head on and waved at the girl through a front window of the cafe. Then, he removed the mask, put it back in the van and resumed his breakfast in the cafe.
The rabbit head was a full size, 1 1/2 to 2 foot high paper-mache mask which covered a person's entire head. It had pipe-cleaner whiskers, large eyelets and enormous pink ears.
Shortly, a local bank employee called the sheriff's office to report that a customer had come into the bank with her granddaughter and said that they had just seen the Easter bunny outside the bank. The bank employee also told the sheriff that another person came into the bank saying that a man had got out of a van wearing a rabbit head and had looked into the bank's windows.
Believing the two men were bank robbers, a sheriff's officer then issued an all points bulletin (APB) to pick up and hold the two men, with a warning that they were armed and dangerous. In response to the APB, the two men were arrested at gunpoint by state police in a nearby town, hand cuffed and transported back to the sheriff's office.
After being held and questioned for almost 3 hours, the men were released, and no charges were filed. It seems that, as the men traveled into each county, they would stop and take a photo of one of them wearing the rabbit head next to the county road sign. They also had a seven foot stuffed dog in the van for the same purpose.
Subsequently, the men filed a civil rights action in federal court claiming that they were arrested without probable cause, in violation of their constitutional rights. The court found that there had been no probable cause for their arrest. (Wagner v. County of Cattaraugus, 866 F. Supp. 709, W.D.N.Y. 1994)
So, if you see the Easter bunny waving at your window, it may not be a hare raising experience after all. But if it were, the Easter bunny may well find a hare in legal soup.
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