Nebraska's civil forfeiture reform
journalstar.com
journalstar.com
> For example, if a person suspected of drug trafficking is stopped by local law enforcement on Interstate 80 en route to another state, it's possible Nebraska laws would provide no avenue to prosecute that person and therefore no way to permanently seize the cash, Shasserre said.
"You can't take their money if you don't have enough evidence to prosecute" is a feature, not a bug.
> Garrett said the goal is first and foremost to protect people's due process rights.
> "You can what-if things to death," he said. "If they don't have a case — too bad, so sad."
At the risk of defending a complete moron (the AG), he is likely an elected official who the people of the state want to do these things and the law is preventing him from doing the will of the people.
(analysis of a point of view, not a validation of it)
That doesn't sound like Freedom! to me, that sounds like a police state...
Efforts to pretend otherwise, but only for suspected drug dealers, lost that qualifier a decade or so ago when fiscal conservatives started to doom state governments to persistent budget shortfalls. Police departments lacking funding found themselves a status as highwaymen that the federal government (since Reagan) would tolerate, robbing out-of-state vehicles under cover of federal law and judicial precedent.
These people swear an oath to uphold the Constitution. There is no wiggle room on this subject in the Bill of Rights for people to have their possessions stripped from their person absent a criminal conviction. Practitioners of 'civil asset forfeiture' are traitors to that oath and to their country, in addition to being guilty of the common crime of armed robbery.
Why hasn't it been changed yet?
* It's rare. This is not an everyday thing.
* It often targets people on long-haul car journeys through what wealthy people (the sort who can afford lawyers) term 'the flyover states'. Most people do not want to battle this in court at least a days' drive from their home, on disadvantaged terms with a lawyer who will cost more than the goods in question.
* Most wealthy people (the sort who can afford lawyers) no longer carry large amounts of cash.
* State & local police departments have become reliant on it. Law enforcement agencies are extremely averse to going up against each other. Politicians with the power to shape law respond to the opinion of the people in the place they live and to local campaign donations by wealthy people, not to out-of-state victims.
Civil asset forfeitures totaled $2.5 Billion in 2010 [1] , or approximately $8 per citizen of the country. Keep in mind that if the police hand isn't in your pocket, it's in someone else's.
This is bullshit and needs to stop. It's leading to bad places and actually makes me fear and disrespect the police, which is totally inverted from police's purpose!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
" I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. "
- Grover Norquist, possessor of a signed loyalty oath from much of the Republican Party towards the goal of ritual opposition to new taxes
" It's now possible for a drug dealer to serve time in a forfeiture-financed prison after being arrested by agents driving a forfeiture-provided automobile while working in a forfeiture-funded sting operation. "
— Reagan attorney general Richard Thornburgh in 1989.
This is implicitly corrupting and, again, explicitly unconstitutional. The historical civil forfeiture was used in British Naval law to seize assets of overseas fugitives before charging them; It was one of the reasons the US rebelled. Stealing cash from one's pocket because one is carrying cash and this is inherently suspicious, without charges when given every opportunity to arrest, has never been historically acceptable.
You describe a farce that the current generation of police, legislators, district attorneys, and judges have decided to entertain because they grew too friendly & were never invested in the principles they claim to serve. It is not a victimless show they are putting on.
I mean, the words in your statement make some sense in that each one is related to the next concept in the sentence, but together they are a satire of Constitutional and common law.
Note: Police get to divide this loot among themselves (as their own private property) it does not even go to government coffers.
that's insane! Why aren't Americans rioting in the streets about this?
Fortunately this family of stories are getting more ink and video. John Oliver did a show on it. Local stories popup about small time business owner trying to buy a truck getting screwed.
So we are seeing two things America likes hitting heads: fighting terror and small businesses getting screwed.
Americans don't riot because they think "drug person lost his motel? who cares?".
The best part is, there is zero penalty for trying to take an entire hotel! It's like Grand Theft Auto in reverse with god mode on.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hous...
A guy gets caught on street selling marijuana worth $10 he has a teen friend with him at that time. Cops arrest him (the friend) and then visit his home which happens to be owned by his own Grandparents who live with another 9 young grand-children in that home. Cops take the house and make the grandparents pay a rent to continue in their own home. Grandparents are poor and can't pay the rent hence they settle for the plea bargain where they basically give the home to cops in return of freedom of their grandchild and forgiving the rent money for one month they stayed in it.
In other words, even if you can demonstrate that a particular story is made up, it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. It doesn't even mean that it doesn't happen often.
A DA who has compassion for people, who tries to be nice and keep the community safe without being overzealous is likely to lose to someone who keep trash talking criminals, puts lot of people behind bars etc.
"Mr. X is a child abuser, should he be sent to jail? " How can anyone answer NO to that question but in reality Mr. X married a girl of 17 years old and could have had a very happy married life.
It isn't something that your average middle class American has to worry about too often. Cops mostly target the poor and people of color so the issues around civil forfeiture are largely unknown outside those who have experienced abuse of civil forfeiture.
Just like how many white Americans think racism is a solved problem since they don't experience it personally.
Here's the thing. There are two kinds of legal systems in the US, the civil system and the criminal justice system. In criminal justice there are tons and tons of protections for the rights of individuals, right to legal counsel, right to face your accusers, right of a jury trial, presumption of innocence, and very importantly the requirement that a trial find you guilty "beyond reasonable doubt" in order to mete out a sentence. In civil law a lot of that doesn't exist (the lowest rung being small claims court) and most importantly the requirement for a conviction is merely a "preponderance of the evidence" standard, meaning that it's more likely than not that the defendant committed the crime (i.e. 50 + epsilon percent chance).
The kicker is that with civil forfeiture laws the accused is not a person, no individual has to be found guilty of a criminal offense, the accused is an item, a piece of property. This neatly skirts a lot of the protections of the constitution and civil law. The basic idea is that if you pull over Jim Bob on a country road and you take ten thousand dollars off his person you don't need to put Jim Bob on trial in criminal court and convict him to take any of his stuff, instead you can put the ten thousand dollars on trial in civil court and assess whether there was a greater than even odds that it was in some way involved in a crime (typically drug dealing) and then when a judge says "sure enough, that seems likely" you take that money and you use it to pad out the operating budget of your police agency.
Seems ridiculous but it's been a major aspect of the "War on Drugs" for over 3 decades now. Consider, for example, this court case, the United States Versus $124,700 in US Currency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._$124,700_in_U...
This sort of thing happens on a regular basis day in day out. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods and cash are seized every year in the US.
And yes, it does sound like a police state. The War on Drugs has been one of the most extreme erosions of rights and liberties in the entire history of the US.
It relies on the obvious farce of an inanimate object being able to commit a crime, though. Kinda flies in the face of "guns don't kill people..."
[0]https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
If you're a concerned Californian you might want to contact the senator who introduced it, Holly Mitchell [1]
[0] http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert...
http://dailysignal.com/2016/04/22/nebraska-abolishes-civil-f...
Umm, not sure if it's just me, but this link doesn't even let me read the article without answering a survey like "Do you currently have auto insurance?"