Sen. Mike Lee on Civil Asset Forfeiture

[Brian4Liberty]

Sen. Mike Lee on Civil Asset Forfeiture

[Brian4Liberty]

Related:

Wyoming lawmakers continue to work on long overdue protections for innocent property owners

The Wyoming Legislature's Joint Judiciary Committee met on Thursday in Gillette to review two draft bills that would reform the state's terrible civil asset forfeiture laws. Though members of the committee considered the draft proposals, they instructed staff to draft a new bill for consideration at the next hearing, likely in early October.

Members of the committee are taking a serious look at reform after an unsuccessful attempt earlier this year to pass legislation that would have ended civil asset forfeiture in Wyoming. In Civil Asset Forfeiture: Grading the States, FreedomWorks gave Wyoming an "F" for its current forfeiture laws. The standard of evidence needed to subject seized property to forfeiture is incredibly low and the burden of proof falls on the property owner, who may never be charged with a crime.

In February, the Wyoming Legislature gave final approval to legislation that would have required a criminal conviction before property connected to a crime or obtained from the proceeds of criminal activity could be subject to forfeiture. Unfortunately, Gov. Matt Mead, a former federal prosecutor, vetoed the bill. A subsequent override attempt in the state Senate was unsuccessful.
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While the fate of civil asset forfeiture reform will fall on Gov. Mead, who insists that Wyoming's current forfeiture laws have not been abused, a new report from the state's attorney general shows that less than 15 percent of seized cash between 2010 and the beginning of 2015 was returned to its owner. "Nearly $1.3 million in cash was seized and $190,000 was returned to the claimants, either on orders of a judge who determined there wasn't enough evidence for the state to keep the money, or because the owners negotiated with prosecutors to take part of it back," the Casper Star Tribune recently reported. "The federal government was able to keep some of the money -- $56,754 -- in cases in which federal agencies were involved."

The report did not offer any data on how many people from whom cash or property was seized were charged with or convicted of a crime. But keep in mind that under Wyoming's current civil asset forfeiture laws, prosecutors do not have to charge or convict someone before going after their assets in forfeiture proceedings. The standard of evidence needed to subject property to forfeiture is the same as what is needed to obtain a search warrant. The number of innocent people affected by Wyoming's terrible civil asset forfeiture laws may be small, but protections are needed to ensure that no law-abiding citizen's property is unjustly taken.
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http://www.freedomworks.org/content/...roperty-owners

[osan]

Mike Lee is normatively correct and positively dead-wrong. They do NOT have to go by the rules because for all practical purposes the rules have been kicked to the curb.

While I understand why he speaks in such a voice, I wonder whether it does as much harm as good. I say this because this brand of speech seems to have an effect similar to that encountered in a "motivational" seminar: it gets you all hyped up, but a few hours later you are back where you were, mentally. I might just be full of crap on this point, but toss it out there for your consideration.

My point is that we have been doing the same things over and over and the results have been deeply and almost universally negative. The more we talk, the further into de-facto serfdom we slide, and the usurpers show absolutely NO sign of letting up. This suggests the possibility that we need to change something... attitude to be sure, but what else, I am no longer able to say. There is not even the will to come together as a statistical majority to agree on what is right and wrong in terms of governance. And here, the so-called "right" is as much at fault as the so-called "left" Libertarians, agorists, anarchists and the like are the only ones who appear to have even so much as a clue regarding such considerations and they are a TINY speck of flea poo on the butt of a great elephant in terms of proportion.

That seems to leave us in a very bad spot, what with at least 75% of Americans still "at the mall". I find myself hoping and praying for a truly catastrophic threat to arise - and I mean a real one and not something arranged and managed my some cartel of politically like-minded fools who endeavor to control it all because they think they are entitled to rule, or whatever their base motives may be. I see no way that anything short of the implacable intervention of hard, harsh, mass-murdering reality is going to shake the people of the world loose from the mass psychosis that has gripped the race of men. It seems that the perceptual base of a sufficient proportion of the world's population has gone deeply enough into madness that there is now no reasonable possibility of drawing the world at large out of its disconnection from rational perceptions of themselves, those around them, and our places in the world of our fellows. That leaves only two possibilities: we continue on, building upon the now hopelessly diseased mental platforms upon which our judgments as living beings are made regarding virtually every aspect of our lives, or we experience what I have been calling a "reset event" - a cataclysm of a nature and degree sufficient to sweep away the insanities of perception that so many of us now take as wisdom and truth.

Such an event must perforce be crushingly murderous, as far as I can see, because at the end of the day people who have gone mentally unsound (the vast majority of humans walking the earth today) understand and respect nothing less than callously unforgiving brutality. The lessons of ghastly death is the only thing that teaches those who remain what is sane and what is not.

Do I want to see the world of men destroyed? No. But unless someone can point me to an effective alternative, I see no other way that people can be shaken back to rational perspectives without the help of the Grim Reaper. That which makes humans strong and wonderful is the precise same thing that makes them weak and worthy of nothing better than destruction. Our nature is strongly dualistic, it seems, and when we allow our minds to wander to far from the farm, we endanger ourselves both individually and collectively. Perhaps this is the God's scheme of things - the ebb and flow of species, that of men about to ebb either into outright destruction or that of mere existence, unworthy of the living.

One thing I can say for certain: as long as we are ABLE to continue on this path toward mere existence as the chattel of other men, we will do so. I no longer see a voluntary path back to sanity and freedom, not because it does not exist in concept, but because hopelessly insane brutes now constitute a mob so large that their mere inertia prevents movement back to safe and sane living. Add to that the successful cultivation of their most base and corrupt traits and we see that they actively work to make certain everyone's chains remain in place and well intact. It is astonishing to bear witness to seven billion people having gone quietly and almost imperceptibly mad, one tiny bite at a time.

Deep are the feces in which we all stand.

[osan]

In February, the Wyoming Legislature gave final approval to legislation that would have required a criminal conviction before property connected to a crime or obtained from the proceeds of criminal activity could be subject to forfeiture. Unfortunately, Gov. Matt Mead, a former federal prosecutor, vetoed the bill. A subsequent override attempt in the state Senate was unsuccessful

This is why I say that, barring the elimination of government as currently constituted, there should be term limits and those should be ONE. You can serve only ONE term as a political official. Not one term as this and one as that, but ONE term, period... in your entire lifetime. If you are a prosecutor for, say, four years, then that is the only thing you will ever be able to place on your resume regarding your political career.

That would force people to get more involved in governance. It would also make plain which governmental offices were really important. Those with no market value would die on the vine, and that would be the best thing to happen to the world in many thousands of years.

I will not, however, be holding my breath on this.