USA Today: Civil asset forfeiture is government at its absolute worst.

[Anti Federalist]

When police play bounty hunter: Our view

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinio...ates/19299879/

The Editorial Board, 2:44 p.m. EST November 20, 2014

Civil asset forfeiture is government at its absolute worst.

Ming Ton Liu, a Chinese-born American, was driving to Louisiana last year to buy a restaurant when he was stopped for speeding in Alabama.

A sheriff's deputy questioned Liu, searched his car and found $75,195 in cash, which was for a down payment. Liu was ticketed for speeding and held for a few hours. A drug-sniffing dog was brought in. Police said the dog "alerted" after sniffing the money and Liu gave conflicting accounts. But no drugs were found. No charges were filed.

Authorities seized the cash anyway.

It took Liu 10 months, two lawyers and two claims to get back the money he and his relatives had saved. By then, the restaurant deal fell through.

Liu, who has no criminal record, was luckier than most people cheated by an increasingly common — and utterly outrageous — practice that can amount to legalized theft by police. According to The Washington Post, authorities have used "civil asset forfeiture" programs more than 61,000 times since 9/11 to seize cash and valuables worth $2.5 billion, all without search warrants or indictments.

The programs, born in the 1970s to seize ill-gotten gains from drug trafficking, have become unmoored from their original intent of taking the profit out of crime. Police can seize a person's assets without charging them with a crime and — incredibly — wind up keeping the loot for the department's financial benefit, an arrangement one might expect in a banana republic, not the United States.

Many victims have done nothing more than carry an amount of cash police find "suspicious." They included drivers with cash to renovate a house, purchase a used car or buy shrubbery for a landscape business. A traffic violation, or a perceived one, is often used as a pretext for a stop and seizure.

Once money, a car or other valuables are seized, it's up to individuals to prove that the property was not derived from a crime — a complex task that can mean paying a lawyer to battle local prosecutors or a federal agency. Many people can't afford to do it. Even when people fight, this guilty-until-proven-innocent system is stacked in the government's favor.

All this was enabled by a 1984 federal law that let authorities keep a chunk of the money they seize. Today, more than 40 states have similar laws. (Thanks again St. Reagan. - AF)

In the past few years, private consultants — often former law enforcement officers — have gotten in on the act, teaching aggressive tactics in "highway interdiction," the system that trapped Liu.

A few states have tried to rein in abuse, passing stronger protections for individuals. A new law in Minnesota requires a conviction or guilty plea before assets can be seized. Measures introduced in Congress could help rein in this travesty.

For starters, assets seized should no longer go to the agencies that seized them, removing any profit motive. More broadly, no one should be "fined" by a seizure when he has not even been charged with a crime.

Civil asset forfeiture is government at its absolute worst — intimidating helpless citizens for its own benefit. It needs to go away.

[angelatc]

And it's taken the media 30 years to notice?

[Cleaner44]

And it's taken the media 30 years to notice?

Nice to see you back!

[Anti Federalist]

And it's taken the media 30 years to notice?

Yup, but by god, now we'll see some action.

A SWLOD from the editors of USA Today has got to have the standing army shaking in their boots.

[phill4paul]

No one will steal from me without a bloodbath. No one. And that's all I really have to say on the matter.

[cindy25]

I wouldn't put all the blame on Reagan, although he made it worse. southern states were doing this for decades, some even allowing personal commissions for traffic fines

[Tod]

No one will steal from me without a bloodbath. No one. And that's all I really have to say on the matter.

I take it you don't own real estate?


I was reminded today of John Joe Gray....

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ns-ending.html

[Pericles]

No one will steal from me without a bloodbath. No one. And that's all I really have to say on the matter.

The real purpose of having an armed and organized population is to make such tyranny dangerous to the tyrant. Power will expand until it is checked by other power.

[PaulConventionWV]

No one will steal from me without a bloodbath. No one. And that's all I really have to say on the matter.

Somebody's going to have to do something, that's for sure. We can't fight this with lawyers or voting.

[Czolgosz]

The real purpose of having an armed and organized population is to make such tyranny dangerous to the tyrant. Power will expand until it is checked by other power.

Newton's 3rd.

[thoughtomator]

Yup, but by god, now we'll see some action.

A SWLOD from the editors of USA Today has got to have the standing army shaking in their boots.

SWLOD?

[tod evans]

SWLOD?

Strongly worded letter of discontent.

[heavenlyboy34]

The real purpose of having an armed and organized population is to make such tyranny dangerous to the tyrant. Power will expand until it is checked by other power.

A lovely and quaint (and frankly naive) 18th century sort of thought. But I highly doubt you'll ever get your hands on enough weaponry to make the regime's strongmen quake in their boots.

[acptulsa]

Depends on how many of the 315,000,000 Americans decide enough is enough. Doesn't it?

[Anti Federalist]

Strongly worded letter of discontent.

Discontent and/or disapproval

[Anti Federalist]

Strongly worded letter of discontent.

Discontent and/or disapproval

[otherone]

A lovely and quaint (and frankly naive) 18th century sort of thought.

So is the constitution.

[Anti Federalist]

A lovely and quaint (and frankly naive) 18th century sort of thought. But I highly doubt you'll ever get your hands on enough weaponry to make the regime's strongmen quake in their boots.

Nope, gotta disagree here.

For all of Leviathan's belching, blustering, brutality and blow-hardiness, in the end, it is a paper tiger.

Bundy Ranch proved that.

It would only take 10-15 percent of the population, fully committed and armed as resistance fighters to bring the whole sham tumbling down.

What would rise in its place is a mystery, and a risk.

But it can't hardly be worse than what we have now, or what is planned for us mundanes in the future in this regime.

[Pericles]

A lovely and quaint (and frankly naive) 18th century sort of thought. But I highly doubt you'll ever get your hands on enough weaponry to make the regime's strongmen quake in their boots.

Battle of Athens
Bundy Ranch
Next?

[Occam's Banana]

The real purpose of having an armed and organized population is to make such tyranny dangerous to the tyrant. Power will expand until it is checked by other power.

A lovely and quaint (and frankly naive) 18th century sort of thought.

What is naive about it?

SWLODs & voting sure as hell won't do the job. And non-compliance, while necessary, is alone not sufficient for the purpose.

An armed (and non-compliant) populace is ultimately the only real or significant check against the power of the State.

But I highly doubt you'll ever get your hands on enough weaponry to make the regime's strongmen quake in their boots.

You appear to be assuming the necessity of (at least) a "tit-for-tat" correspondence between the armory of the State and the armory of the People. But the fact that the State may significantly "outgun" the People in terms of materiel is not dispositive. Far from it. The use and application of force is not costless - not even for the State. Thus, the People do not need sufficient armory to go "toe to toe" with the State. They only need sufficient armory to overcome the willingness of the State to pay the costs of forcibly imposing its will upon them. (And among those costs is not just the expenditure of monies and physical assets, but - much more significantly - the further alienation and provocation of the population, the emboldening of "revolutionaries," the creation of new "revolutionaries," the potential loss of "legitimacy" in the eyes of otherwise neutral or even friendly observers, etc. For "extreme" examples of these things, see the American Revolution, the Vietnam War, and the Soviets' invasion of Afghanistan.)