Civil Forfeiture - Theft by Police

[Papewaio]

Surely it should be upto a court to prove the owner is guilty before seizing the property?

Is innocent until proven guilty no longer a default standard in the US?

[lars573]

Surely it should be upto a court to prove the owner is guilty before seizing the property?

Is innocent until proven guilty no longer a default standard in the US?

In criminal law yes. I took it to wikipedia due to the civil in the name. Asset forfeiture (the proper name) is a civil tort against a piece of property. And thus to the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" does not apply. In fact in such a case the owner of the property is a third party claimant.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Surely it should be upto a court to prove the owner is guilty before seizing the property?

Is innocent until proven guilty no longer a default standard in the US?

People don't even have to be charged with a crime. In civil forfeiture, it's the objects themselves that are charged, and assumed to be guilty, so a person has to prove theer innocence - ie that they obtained everything legally.

I don't know what your beef with the video is Sasaki; it presents all the legally important facts. This isn't some web journalist, it's a nationwide legal group that's fought all sorts of unjust government restrictions.

Everything you list about crimes is irrelevant. Sure, police will use it as an excuse, but they haven't proven the motel owners guilty of anything. Allegations prove absolutely nothing, especially when no charges have even been filed. They've got no evidence of crimes committed by the motel owners. I guess the question is if you want the police to seize things from people just because there have been allegations against them.

Sometimes the police listen in on innocent people, but we don't get rid of warranted wiretapping just because it doesn't work perfectly. The idea that the police are fabricating cases on people, seizing their property, and then selling it to pad their own pockets is worthy.

But of course. You don't know about the issue, and it's me that's crazy because of that. I didn't say the police are fabricating cases on people. They can, and do, seize money from people without charging them with any crime, and they get to use that money or property to fund their department. Do you see the incentive for abuse there?

Gee, it's not like civil forfeiture has been abused by police in Indiana ( http://www.indy.com/posts/forfeiture...-of-the-system & http://www.ogdenonpolitics.com/2010/...aw-wheres.html ) or around the country ( http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/2...feiture-racket) ( http://www.theagitator.com/2007/12/2...iture-outrage/ )

Luther Ricks and his wife worked most of their lives at a steel foundry in Ohio. Not trusting of banks, they say they’ve lived frugally, and managed to save more than $400,000 over the years, which they kept in a safe in their home.

Last summer, two burglars broke into Ricks’ home. He shot and killed one of them. Police determined he acted in self-defense, and cleared him of any criminal wrongdoing. But local police did find a small amount of marijuana in Ricks’ home, which Ricks says he uses to manage the pain of his arthritis and a hip replacement surgery. Ricks was never charged for the marijuana. But finding it in his home was enough for city police to confiscate Ricks and his wife’s life savings under drug war asset forfeiture laws. Oddly enough, the FBI then stepped in, and claimed the money for itself.

Consistent with asset forfeiture laws, the federal government now says Ricks has to prove he earned the money legitimately in order to get it back. Of course, he doesn’t have dated receipts going back thirty-plus years. And he can’t hire a lawyer—the government has of his money.

Also, under asset forfeiture laws, even if Ricks were able to prove in court that he earned the money legitimately, he, not the government, would have to absorb the court costs.

It's like I've just come back from a hike and said it's raining, while the person who stayed at home says I'm wrong because he's been watching a movie where it's sunny.

Oh, there's this good from Texas as well; http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...,6051682.story

TENAHA, Texas— You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or other valuables.

That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money laundering or other serious crimes.

More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June 2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged with any crime.
...
David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those, Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly—and discovered all but one of them were black.

"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable."

In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it—such as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a private seller.

Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges for crimes such as money laundering—and the prospect of having to hire a lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions to contest the charges.

The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered pre-signed and pre-notarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an officer to describe the property being seized.

CR

PS - You can run a meth lab in a backpack.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

No, here's the thing CR. You link to these stories of a guy taking bribes from drug dealers, and another guy dealing marijuana and crack out of his house who says it's for his "shingles" and accept them as police abuse with no questions asked. You put them on the same level with an extremely clear cut case of corrupt small town cops who are breaking the law (and who are going to get busted for it if wikipedia tells me right). I question your ability or rather your desire to discern. That video is classic propaganda.

Stories of cops sexual harrassing people while patting them down aren't a good reason to say that the cops can't pat people down anymore. Stories about someone innocent getting injured in a take down aren't a good reason to say that cops can't take people down. You can't even take a case where the cops shot an innocent man and say we should take the guns.

You can say, "tazers kill people sometimes, here's the evidence, here's the benefit to tazers, here's the alternatives that are just as good". I don't know if that's true or not, but that's what the argument would look like from any non-biased person. And that's the kind of argument you need to make here. Not "here's one case, or one town, where I believe it's been misused--this law is a travesty". Your belief that the tenaha cops are representative of the norm for cops is what convinces you.

[Crazed Rabbit]

This isn't comparable to pat-downs. Actually, I have a problem with Terry stops - where a cop can basically pat down anyone on the street he sees.

But a pat down where a cop has stopped someone he has probably cause to believe committed a crime is entirely different.

The pat down is being done because a crime was committed. That's comparable to criminal forfeiture, where the government actually has to prove someone committed a crime in order to take their property.

The whole basis of this law is take property from people without proving them guilty of any crime. It's not just ripe for abuse, it's designed for abuse - for getting people the police can't convict of any crime. If you get patted down, then you haven't lost anything after it's over.

And it's not just small towns like Tenaha, but whole states like Indiana (where police forces find loopholes to keep the funds seized instead of sending them to public schools as required in the law, and give private attorneys commissions for prosecuting civil forfeiture cases [that is unconstitutional].)

Letting police seize the property of suspected - and never convicted or even charged - drug dealers is what lead to the abuses in Tenaha.

Everyone, even alleged criminals, deserves to hold on to their allegedly ill-gotten property at least until proven guilty of a crime. Legally, how can that not be police abuse? How can police seizing property of people not convicted of anything - and therefore innocent under the law - for their own benefit not be an abuse?

CR

[Sasaki Kojiro]

If we're talking about cases where the cops abuse the law in ways that aren't legal, then we aren't disagreeing.

But for the drug dealer guy, I don't see anything wrong with the sequence of events:

1) Robbers break in and get shot (what were they doing there btw? Coincidence?)
2) Police find 11 oz of weed and some paraphernalia and traces of crack and 400 grand in a safe
3A) He's a drug dealer and they confiscate the money, but don't charge him because they haven't caught him actually dealing. Alternative legally would be claiming anyone with a certain amount of drugs is a dealer, but that's pretty dicey. Justice is served.
3B) He's innocent, and files some paperwork for no charge showing that he's been withdrawing his salary from the bank in cash for years (like his friend said he had been doing in one of the articles). He gets his money back.

I just think you set yourself too low a standard for evidence of wrongdoing when it comes to police action (ironically). And you generalize too much from selective examples. I seriously doubt that most clear cut cases of the correct application of this law ever make the news.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Yay!

http://ij.org/massachusetts-civil-fo...ease-1-24-2013

Arlington, Va.—In a major triumph for property rights, a federal court in Massachusetts dismissed a civil forfeiture action against the Motel Caswell, a family-run motel in Tewksbury, handing a complete victory to owners Russell and Patricia Caswell. In one of the most contentious civil forfeiture fights in the nation, Magistrate Judge Judith G. Dein of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts concluded, based on a week-long bench trial in November 2012, that the motel was not subject to forfeiture under federal law and that its owners were wholly innocent of any wrongdoing.
The Institute for Justice and local counsel Schlossberg, LLC, brought the case to trial to expose the injustices of civil forfeiture laws that allow law enforcement agencies to pad their budgets by taking property from innocent owners who have never been convicted or even charged with a crime.
Download the federal court ruling (pdf).
“This is a complete victory for the Caswell family and for the protection of private property rights,” said Scott Bullock, senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. “The Caswells will keep their motel, and private property rights are preserved.”
The government had sought to take the Motel Caswell from the Caswell family under the theory that the motel allegedly facilitated drug crimes. But the court found that Mr. Caswell “did not know the guests involved in the drug crimes, did not know of their anticipated criminal behavior at the time they registered as guests, and did not know of the drug crimes while they were occurring.”

CR

[The Lurker Below]

That judge really did the police a favor. How much easier must it be on them to know that 1/3 of crime can be responded to just by keeping an officer hanging out in the lobby.