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Civil Forfeiture is the Lamest thing ever
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Well, the fact that he agrees with the action because he doesn't have that much money is a fallacy. But I'm sick of that "olol fallacy" shit too.
The appeal to emotion is in "It affects only "bad people", us good honest folk suffer nothing but an inconvenience.". I said 10 other fallacies, because the example given is exaggerated on purpose(high 4 digit amount could be enough for the confiscation and shift of burden of proof) and the analogy at the end is bad as the situation with car impounding has no actual consequences for lawful owners.(you can't legally own a car without a document.)
Wtf is your point again?
Edit: Guys, seriously, wtf does "I'm sick of olol fallacy" mean?
If you're putting down a down payment on a home, you have some quick and easy paperwork to prove you were legitimately going off with a wad of cash to put down a down payment (these things are agreed to in advance, and the company is expecting you. Pick up the phone.
You can keep looking, but in today's society there's no reason to wander around with a shitload of money and have no paperwork anywhere regarding it. And if you ARE using it to buy something with no papertrail, the IRS wants a word with both sides of the transaction.
As for warrants, yes! They do have warrants. You can also stupidly agree to let people search your shit without one. And no, for the paranoid out there, saying No to a search request doesn't mean you get bent over. If you do, you get to have another quarter million from suing the police dept and anything they find on you is inadmissible in court.
I'm still not quite comfortable calling that an appeal to emotion as that wasn't what I got out of the post at all. Isn't "affecting 'bad guys' while being of minimal consequence to 'good guys'" a common property of criminal legislation and security practices?
The sum in the example was exaggerated? You mean the approximation of the sum from the article?
Again with the paperwork? I explicitly said that the person was keeping it sans bank. No paperwork to be had for the carrying of the dough.
Some people are finicky and don't trust banks. Can you quote a reference that says the IRS needs to know where the money came from before the transaction, other than "personal finances"? I'd almost guarantee that I don't need to show the homeowner anything if it's cash down. I'm sure rich people do it all the time. (A rich person that doesn't keep their money in a bank wouldn't have the paper trail)
That's good to hear. I'll refuse the cops next time they ask to search my car.
paperwork: If you're buying a house, a deed must change hands. THIS IS PAPERWORK. If we're buying a house with no bank and no deed and no contract, you just gave someone a large amount of cash and didn't buy a house. Congrats? At this point the cops taking your money is probably a good thing, because they're stopping you from being Fucking Stupid.
IRS: they don't need to know where it came from before the transaction. They need to know where it Goes. That's paperwork again! If you're buying a house and giving a down payment, the down payment is part of the paperwork that says you're paying X up front. Side note: if you slip them Y under the table and just fuck with the numbers on paper? That's illegal and called Fraud. So if you're off with your cash to hand over the down payment: A) they're expecting you and
Cops: "olo cop corruption" doesn't fly for me. I've told plenty of cops and security guards No, and the penalty at worst is being detained at the location for 30 minutes while they Get a warrant. At the very least they try and look mean and then have to let you go. If they fail to do either of those, I get to sue them for a fuckload of money.
I don't get what you're trying to prove. All this is post-transaction not pre-transaction.
Yeah I could have $5,000,000 with no paperwork, but if I spent that on candy I'd have candy. What's your point?
I didn't even know there is an article. I participated in the discussion somewhere on the first pages and thought it had simply moved on from property to money now. Didn't realize the money quote showed up from an actual news item. It's still grossly exaggerated as that's way over the minimum that could see your money confiscated, but I can see where it came from now and it obviously wasn't done on purpose.
That the burden of proof to get the money back post seizure is Low. Astonishingly Low. Any paperwork counts.
If you have a dickload of cash on hand and are driving around with it to go buy something, they know you're coming. You do not walk into a house with $250,000 and say "Hi, I'm here to buy this immediately", nor do you walk into a candy store with five million dollars in cash and ask to buy five million dollars in candy.
The IRS cares when money moves. It's allowed to question money in transit to make sure that it hasn't been moved and not reported. Large amounts of cash are not typically used for immediate payments (seriously, do you walk around with suitcases of money to buy things? seriously?), so they're flagged as suspicious and you just need to provide a minor paper trail to show everything is legit.
Think up a valid reason that someone has a million dollars in a suitcase that has never been withdrawn from a bank, paid to him by an IRS reporting company, and is not going to be used to buy anything that involves a contract or an appointment. Any of those things would be enough proof to keep going with the money.
The fallacy here is that the argument makes no attempt to address whether it is legal; it merely states that people who carry that much cash are likely to have obtained it illegally and therefore it's not so terrible when it gets taken away. "It usually only happens to bad people" isn't a reliable Constitutional test. It's not going to hold up in court.
From the Fifth Amendment:
No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Now, in these cases, we see people with cash, expensive cars, boats, and sometimes family farms or roommate's computers, without being charged with anything at all, having their property taken, for use by the police department and the feds. It doesn't matter one bit whether the stuff was obtained legally or not, you're not allowed to take it away without compensation until after a trial has occurred and the person found guilty. They do this too, and it's called Criminal Forfeiture. It's exactly the same except the state has to prove that you have committed a crime with the property, or obtained the property illegally.
The burden of proof may be low if you have good documentation, but it's still on the suspect instead of the state. They take your shit and you have to prove it's legit in order to get it back? Not reasonable.
Let's remember that if you have $1m USD taken from you in this manner, you are required to post a bail of $100k USD to simply begin proceedings to get it back? Proceedings which can take years? It's not reasonable to defend this policy by saying "oh, they get it back in the end if they're innocent," when it's so costly to get the property back, takes so long, and when the stuff wasn't seized in a Constitutionally legitimate manner in the first place.
Nonononono. This thread got hijacked. Money seized is not Civil Forfeiture. You do not post bail, you do not sue to get it back. You just present paperwork or whatever (bank contact info, accountant contact info, really, anything works), this isn't Civil Forfeiture.
I do know that liquid assets can be seized by the police under Civil Forfeiture laws, and regularly are, even if there are other ways you can control that money.
Think about it from the police's point of view: are you going to hold the money under a system where you'll likely be giving it back in a few days, or are you going to hold it under a system that will make your department at least 10% of the money seized?
Yeah but you don't know that. Who are you to say I don't want to buy that much candy? Really, you can't make a nebulous claim like that because it means nothing.
That seems to be a little outside the IRS' jurisdiction. They're there for income, not the influx or departure of money. Department of Treasury seems the more correct place. You're looking for laws that apply to income of a 1 time event, or the transfer of money between parties. Not money traveling through states in someone's pocket. (or briefcases)
Because that's the way they wanted to do it? Really, I don't need a reason to not keep my money in a bank if I choose not to. I said before, the pay-stub thing really doesn't prove anything other than "Yes I could've made this much." However, I doubt they'd take only a pay-stub as proof, even if they can prove you've never used a bank, ever.
I'm surprised someone didn't take my "buy some candy" and spin it into "to lure children" which would summarily end with "think of the children!"
That would've made this thread complete.
The burden of proof is THAT LOW. The only thing they're looking for is paper trail free money. Which the IRS haaaates. Hence why they have a bunch of rules on the books to make sure that at some point all money is accounted for (and thus taxed properly). If you have a dickload of money, the feds are fine with it. If you can prove it's been on the books somewhere. If you have a dickload of money that at no point was ever recorded as being given to you and you're not off to use in a recorded transaction with, they want some evidence that it's not fraud. Because really, there's no reason to have no records of ever being paid on anyone's books, anywhere, never paying taxes on said money (which would be a record, you see..), buying things that don't produce receipts. Because at this point at the very LEAST it's tax fraud.
The burden of proof is on the wrong side. It's not my job to prove anything to you about the circumstances surrounding my money. It is your job to prove I got it illegally.
The burden of proof in a criminal arrest is on the state to find you guilty, the burden of proof on money doesn't work that way. You're crossing two different criminal justice systems there.
Only kind of. Money seized is almost always a Civil. Which has a burden of proof of just "tipping the scales", which means they need something suspicious. US code says transporting large amounts of money is suspicious and subject to seizure (which also includes that if you get the money back, the owe you interest on it, by the by).
When you hit court, they need to prove you guilty. Until then, they're holding something under suspicion. Courts do the whole burden of proof thing, police do the arresting thing. Large sums of money (the magic number for instant seizure appears to be $65,000 by court precedent), by court cases, appeals, and the US Code are automagically suspicious. Thus they've already proved suspicion, and you need to provide an alibi, as it were. In the form of proof that it's legitimate.
Regulators and traffic cops do the same kind of BS on varying scales.
Making it profitable for an official to financially damage a citizen regardless of guilt is horribly bad policy.
What? How? Liquid assets are still assets, it's the same thing as searching my car and taking my $800 steak knife because someone could've been murdered with it. To me, anyways.
If you fit the bill of a murder suspect, then yes, they will take you, and the knife, temporarily, then give it back to you once you are cleared. If you drive around with a couple hundred grand in your car, a cop is going to assume you're a drug dealer, call the IRS, and ask you to prove that the money is legit. Once you do, which, if innocent, should take a matter of days, if not hours, you get it back. If you can't they keep it and file charges with the irs for unclaimed income, at which point it's their burded to prove guilt to keep ALL the money.
I don't know, he can ask for permission to search, however I don't think he was given permission to take. The evidence should be inadmissible for any crime and should be returned. Unless he had a search warrant with exactly what he was looking for.
The legalities and the ramifications for things like this tend to be dire, and this violates (I want to say two) at least one constitutional amendment right.
Something sitting on the back seat during a traffic stop? Fair game.
Thus, giving permission to search is also permission to take anything the search finds, of course. Plus, it would be kind of stupid to allow a cop to look for drugs, but when he finds your stash he's not allowed to bust you. Heck, they're called Search Warrants, not Search and Seizure Warrants.
The limits are actually on the warrants though. If they're looking for X declared in the warrant and find Y _while looking for X_, it's legit. If they find X and just start opening random shit looking for more, it's invalid.
Says whom? This time I want links.
Okay, then he should've denied him the right to search. Of course, he may have been thinking "well I've got nothing illegal going on here so why not," and it ends up biting him in the ass because someone gets some harebrained idea that's based on nothing. They're called "search warrants" but they're there for unrighteous search and seizures.
And no, they are not allowed to take Y if they're looking for X. That's illegal, actually. But the warrants are usually generalized.
If they go through someone's house and find lots of guns but looking for drugs, they're not allowed to take the guns just because they didn't find the drugs yet. However, if it's generalized to "gang related paraphernalia" they might be able to get away with something like that.
If you get pulled over on a traffic stop and have a pound of dope in your car, but it's an illegal search, you don't get to keep your dope.
Being an illegal search and seizure though, you won't go to prison if you have a half decent lawyer.
Hi!
He can't have a warrant that says "search the kitchen for drugs" and find your gun in the bedroom. He had no reason to be in the bedroom.
But if he's searching for drugs, and you have an illegal firearm on the dining room table being cleaned, you can bet your ass he can take it.
I would bet that if they tried to fight it in court, they'd win. I call bullshit on the, "We can take whatever we want while we search for X" that you two are trying to play off. Prove me wrong. (I want the link myself)
He got the quote at Wikipedia.
Thank you. That's all I wanted.
It seems cars are the exception. However, if it's for a home I think the exception only applies to where the officer wasn't on the premises with a warrant. However the wording on wikipedia is slightly confusing on the exceptions and the only citation is when it's a hotel property.
Actually, the quote was from a law enforcement test, wiki picked it up.
The court case giving it would be http://law.jrank.org/pages/13061/Horton-v-California.html