For once, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals makes a decision that’s not entirely insane.

A Mexican national may sue the U.S. government for selling him a car with a hidden load of marijuana, and then arresting him when he tried to cross the U.S.-Mexico border in it, a federal appeals court has ruled.

The appellate panel reinstated Cervantes’ negligence claims against the government for allegedly failing to find and remove the drugs from the car he purchased in July of 1999 at a U.S. Marshals Service Auction in San Diego, California.

Four months earlier, the car was seized by the Immigration and Naturalisation Service after it was used to transport illegal immigrants into the United States but agents apparently failed to notice 199 pounds of marijuana secreted in its bumpers, the court said.

But the justices decided that Cervantes, a resident of Mexico, could not sue for false imprisonment or false arrest because U.S. Customs agents who found the pot when Cervantes tried to cross the border from Mexico to the United States in October of 1999 “had reasonable cause to believe his arrest was lawful.”

Cervantes spent three and a half months in jail, charged with drug smuggling. He was released after U.S. investigators realised that the marijuana, which had been welded into the bumper, was so decomposed that it could not have been placed there just months earlier, Cervantes’ attorney Stephen Estey of San Diego said.

I’m not sure which is more pathetic: that the pot was overlooked in the first place; that DOJ argued against compensating a 67-year-old man for its own employees’ errors; or that anyone thinks there’s hope to win a “War on Drugs” when the guys on the front line can miss a drug cache that big.