Asset Forfeiture: Legalized Theft by the Police, Now With Added Jeff Sessions!
enlightenedbum
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
This practice has come up in two different threads making the mods angry so I thought I would make a thread for people to talk about it.
Asset forfeiture is a program intended to prevent the ill gotten gains from criminal activities (particularly drug trafficking) from enriching the perpetrators after they are released from prison. There's some logic there. The problem is the practice is ripe for abuse, as that CBC story indicates. Particularly because the process starts before they are found guilty. So innocent people are stopped by police, they're charged with drug possession/trafficking, their stuff is stolen by the police up to and including their homes, and then when a jury finds them not guilty they have to spend a ton of money on a lawyer to get through the legal proceedings to get their stuff back... maybe. It's a bad, awful system.
Eric Holder started to limit the federal portion of the practice in 2015. Not enough and the real move has to happen in the states rather than at the federal level but a good step.
Naturally, Jeff Sessions wants to expand the practice.
The only bit of good news is that government seizure of public property is one of the few areas where there is still some bipartisanship possible, so perhaps this could be curtailed. For example, here's a big fan of Trump's at the Washington frigging Times who hates this.
It's yet another area for people to focus their activism, though understandably most of it is currently going towards health care.
Asset forfeiture is a program intended to prevent the ill gotten gains from criminal activities (particularly drug trafficking) from enriching the perpetrators after they are released from prison. There's some logic there. The problem is the practice is ripe for abuse, as that CBC story indicates. Particularly because the process starts before they are found guilty. So innocent people are stopped by police, they're charged with drug possession/trafficking, their stuff is stolen by the police up to and including their homes, and then when a jury finds them not guilty they have to spend a ton of money on a lawyer to get through the legal proceedings to get their stuff back... maybe. It's a bad, awful system.
Eric Holder started to limit the federal portion of the practice in 2015. Not enough and the real move has to happen in the states rather than at the federal level but a good step.
Naturally, Jeff Sessions wants to expand the practice.
The only bit of good news is that government seizure of public property is one of the few areas where there is still some bipartisanship possible, so perhaps this could be curtailed. For example, here's a big fan of Trump's at the Washington frigging Times who hates this.
It's yet another area for people to focus their activism, though understandably most of it is currently going towards health care.
The idea that your vote is a moral statement about you or who you vote for is some backwards ass libertarian nonsense. Your vote is about society. Vote to protect the vulnerable.
+1
Posts
Note that a big issue here is that the assets are actually the defendants in a civil suit. That means no right to state provided lawyer and a whole raft of rights not applying to random parcel of property. The entire legal construct feels like giant bullshit to me but IANAL and whatnot.
Good point. And naturally the Trump budget eliminates the Legal Services Corporation which helps provide lawyers for poor people who need them for civil cases.
i am constantly amazed at the depths our criminal punishment system will go to to ruin people's lives, frequently over minor drug charges.
Sessions: "We need to intensify the war on drugs."
Nationwide, bipartisan (Clarence Thomas seemed disgusted by the practice last time it came up at SCOTUS) impetus against civil asset forfeiture
Sessions: "We're not stealing enough from people."
I mean civilly forfeited.
It's amazing how brutal the regime is on tourism.
Sometimes things are such transparently bullshit that you do not need to be an educated professional in the field to call that thing bullshit. This looks like one of those times.
Side note: we now have two first page threads with Sessions in the title, and they are both about the government legally fucking people over.
Well my objection is it feels like law that ignores several basic rights by trying to be "clever" about who/what the case is actually against. Even if they were criminal cases against actual people there is still a certain level of injustice in the seizure of property because your child had a ziploc of pot in their pocket while sitting on your porch.
Oh, another thing about them being civil: they use the "preponderance of the evidence" standard instead of "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard for proof.
How can you take the money based on a suspicion? And then if there is no conviction, it's not given back? WTF.
I'm all for taking money and other assets from drug dealers, but only after they've been convicted. Otherwise you are literally taking money from innocent people (innocent until proven guilty).
Asset forfeiture has passed burglary in terms of the value of things it takes.
The court case is against the money, not you. Money doesn't have rights.
Yes, it is bullshit.
The young man who's sold everything he owns in order to pay for college, carrying $10,000+ cash as he's preparing to board a plane when the cops stop and search him. Upon finding the money they claim they smell marijuana from the bag and confiscate it, claiming that such a large amount could only be from drugs. He at least had a happy ending though, several years later.
http://reason.com/blog/2016/12/01/victim-of-airport-forfeiture-gets-his-11
The Christian band manager carrying $53,000 destined for charity stopped on the road for a broken tail-light when the cops searched the car and found the cash, which they immediately confiscated and filed a charge against the man for drug trafficking despite no drugs having been found in the search. Again, this one at least has a happy ending.
http://kfor.com/2016/04/25/man-claims-deputies-seized-50000-meant-for-orphanage-church-and-christian-band/
Notice the key similarities between the two stories: the media got hold of them and brought them to the public eye. But just how many other cases are there where the media didn't pick up the story and the one who lost everything never sees their property again?
Meanwhile police use the funds they seize according to the different laws of the state they're in. However, sometimes those laws can be twisted to do things like enable them to fund things like parties or coffee machines for the break room using their stolen funds without dipping into the departmental budget. In fact some police claim they need asset forfeiture because their budget is lean, nevermind how this is a massive conflict of interest and incentivizes more legal theft than stopping actual crime.
Asset forfeiture needs to be terminated completely. Much like emminent domain, the ideal people say it's meant for is not the reality for which it's used.
Shouldn't be that way, but trust nothing.
That should not happen in the USA. I should not be fucking scared that the police will rob American citizens. That is fucking bullshit.
ie - Jeff Sessions is a horrible horrible fucking person even by the standards of the Republican freaking Party
He's basically the embodiment of the attitude that fucking people over for being looked at funny by the law is the proper thing to do. (and there's a good chance it's because those people are mostly black)
He's still bitter over losing the civil war and having to free his slaves.
Pretty much the first thing they need to do imo is eliminate that. Anything seized needs to go in a big ass pool and just sit there, doing nothing and then get dispersed at the federal or at least state level.
Perhaps it could go to a big fund in order to pay the legal fees for those who sue the police for wrongful arrest or injury when being arrested.
Has SCOTUS actually accepted such an argument?
Fun article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States
TL,DR; Started back with sailing ships, came back a bit during Prohibition but really caught on in the 80's. The SC upheld it in the 90's but had some caveats about it possibly being a grossly disproportionate fine.
Recently they pushed back on a related Colorado statue where fines were kept by the state even in cases where a guilty verdict was overturned. If you wanted the fines back you had to win a court case proving your innocence. Thomas made some negative remarks regarding forfeiture at that time.
Government says nope.
Yes, it's a flagrant 4th amendment violation.
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
well
insane? The hell? The actual fuck?
But I don't understand why people who are not the Police have not, you know, said "fuck that" and changed it? Who the hell votes to allow the police to just take their fucking money when they feel like it?
In what universe does anyone on the left or right say "yeah that makes sense"
Oh no, no no no no. You've got it all wrong!
They don't have to charge you with anything.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
The one where it predominantly affects black people.
I believe you're not American, right? When you think to yourself "Wow, this thing about America makes no fucking sense" ask yourself "is there a racial disparity in how this will impact people?" And then America will make more sense.
The same one in which the police kill in cold blood and people are quick to blame the dead.
It's difficult to tackle things like this because the police have a very powerful union that will do its level best to destroy any politician who tries. It will not be framed as restoring the rights of a free people it will be framed as an attack on all police everywhere.
studied American history at uni, mind
But still I didn't know about this. I'm aware of the racial element but christ on a bike this is crazytown
And then, if you are American, maybe you'll find yourself wanting a stiff drink.
I know I do.
As I say all the time, it's almost impossible to understand the depths of our racial issues without being American. It's the one kind of American exceptionalism that I think is basically true.
I dunno. I think when it comes to history there are advantages to being part of that history and advantages to being outside of it. Being American changes how you see America and can give you a unique insight into American culture and history, but it can also blind you to other insights. Being British I am exactly the same when it comes to British history, gives me a cultural insight that a non-Brit wouldn't have, changes my perception in the same way however.
Certainly I'm aware of how racist the US is to an extent. When I have visited the US the racial segregation of certain occupations and areas is very obvious and strange to me. I think that the nature to which it pervades the American psyche is something that I never really can understand, just as I can never really understand a lot of things about any culture I'm not from. Still, there are egrarious examples of it which shock me, and also egrarious examples of police... tyranny? Is perhaps the word I would use? The way in which the police officer can act as a tyrant over many citizens, anyway, examples of that shock me too at times.
The problem is that since the early 2000s, the laws around civil forfeiture have changed, and then we had the recession that left a lot of local governments struggling to find ways to fund themselves. This isn't a case of bad apples, where small groups of cops are conspiring to pocket cash. It's local governments and police leadership pushing for enforcement policies that help their revenue. We can see that in speeding ticket policies (See: Ferguson), and we can see that in civil forfeiture cases, where the amount of cash considered suspicious begins to shrink, and the link between the dirty money and seized assets becomes more and more tenuous.
The good thing is that it was changes to national law that created this problem, and it's changes to national law that can fix it. Which is a whole lot simpler than say, dealing with speeding ticket fundraising. We don't even need a big supreme court case, congress could do a lot just on their own by restricting where the money goes and who is rewarded for it. A 50k seizure that gets distributed into a nationwide fund isn't going to provide any kind of meaningful perverse incentive to the particular agency that seized it, the actual return is just too small. They also need to revise the evidence requirement to get your money/assets back. It's become more and more arduous to get cash back, when initially forfeiture was more like, "Yo show this money on your reported income / show when you withdrew it from the bank."
Of course in a more general sense lawmakers also need to fix the fucking tax rates, because as long as you're expecting local agencies to perform $x amount of work on a budget of $x-y, they're going to find some way of making up the y. You can fix civil forfeiture, but if you don't make up for the money somewhere else, some other pressure point is going to blow down the line.
*which is one reason why it's more helpful to look at seizure stats state-by-state, national stats can swing wildly based on these kinds of mega-seizures. Also why arguments like "more taken in civil forfeiture than burglaries" is kinda silly.
This is going to be the header on us history books when they talk about the current era.