The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why | Hacker News Reader

The FBI Seized This Woman's Life Savings–Without Telling Her Why

reason.com

251 pointspseudolus120 comments

  About two years post-seizure, the bureau returned Martin's money—shortly after she filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit. But while the bureau may have hoped that would persuade her to drop it, she has continued with her suit, which was back in court last week and seeks a ruling that will prevent the FBI from proceeding with others as it did with her.

Hero.

I've listened to a series of podcasts (More Perfect) where it became clear to me that in the US to get lawsuits go all the way to the Supreme Court, you need both a case (de jure) and a plaintiff that is marketable. This is not a diss on Linda Martin. Going forward with this case in a attempt to get civil forfeiture more constrained after getting your money back is heroic. Just saying that the US legal system needs heroes and that there is a selection mechanism in place for heroes.

That's the Institute of Justice's jam, they have whole teams chipping away at things like this and qualified immunity -- pro bono as an added bonus.

Yeah they are all over it... https://ij.org/case/u-s-private-vaults-seizure/u-s-private-v...

Yes. And it's been this way for a long time.

Rosa Parks was not the first to refuse to move to the back of the bus. She was, however, more suitable for the lawsuit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks#Refusal_to_move

Plessy's "violation" of the despicable Separate Car Act was staged, with the conductor and private detective part fully aware of the planning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_Plessy points out that the early test case planning included looking for a woman of "not more than one-eight colored blood" as the possible plaintiff.

Your historical examples are absolutely fantastic!

A more fictionalized dramatization might be season 4 episode 9 of _The Good Wife_ trying to get a DOMA test case (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife_season_4) which focuses on the need to lose at the initial trial because SCOTUS is part of the appellate court system. (And, of course, you probably need to lose at state-level appeals as well.)

It’s also the timing that matters so it makes it more like the straw that broke the camel’s back. That also is part of making it more marketable.

Wasn't this a story broke by Politico?

Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive. In other countries, seizures go to general revenue, which means that the incentive to do it is diluted enormously. This is especially a problem with small police forces, or small polities where fines become a large proportion of revenue. You'd think that for the FBI the incentive would be diluted, given how huge they are, but maybe there is some institutional incentive there.

I would argue that breaking the incentive is the best way to stop this,as opposed to fighting the detail of seizure justification (although the concept of 'criminal property' without charging the owner should be limited too)

General revenue is barely better. It's probably worse in many cases becase the elected part of the government can ask the thugs to seize harder to keep money coming in and then kick it back to them in the form of resource allocation or preferential treatment. That's how every speed trap town operates

The only solution is to let the petty drug dealers get away with their cars and let the mob bosses get away with their mansions, etc but that requires making it socially unacceptable to support the status quo which means shunning those that do (i.e. basically what happened with racism in the 60s and homosexuality in the 00s) which is hard.

If the last few years should have showed anything it's how little the elected officials typically care about balancing, let alone create excess, budget.

Well there was that Tea Party movement. But the reality is that America is addicted to spending more money than comes in.

And it died the moment there was a Republican in the White House because the GoP doesn't actually care about budget balance, outside of a few individual members, it's just an electoral strategy against Democrats. They have no problem pushing through massive tax cuts with "budget neutral" tricks to get it through with the assumption that they'll simply be extended any ways (and those are just your tax cuts the business tax cuts are, of course, permanent).

The Tea Party was like Gamergate in that it was ostensibly about [overtaxation|ethics in gaming journalism], but was actually driven by [sexism against female games journalists|racism against President Obama], and swiftly co-opted by [the conservative establishment|the conservative establishment] as the right face of the post-OWS idpol wedge. (It would be foolish to think that the divided state of this country was a unilateral push.)

That narrative was created by the journalists Gamergate was against, to deflect against their criticisms. It was never actually true.

And the real Grade A irony is that the same is true for the tea party and he took the post-hoc media spin hook line and sinker.

If you take a step back you'll see that while tea-party, occupy wall street, Maga 1, mostly peaceful 2020/BLM and Maga 2 all take aim at different points in the establishment they're all firmly rooted in the discontent that every day people have with the amount the powers that be are lightening their pockets for causes they don't agree with.

The grassroots movements will keep coming (and they will probably become more extreme too, and the powers that be will keep trying to co-opt and redirect them) until something changes.

My initial description was correct. Unfortunately, people like yourself subscribe to the outcome of years of commiseration that commenced with the aim of rationalizing what was clearly bigotry to even contemporary observers (I was one of those).

It is correct that the grassroots movement that you mentioned had a core of righteous discontent. As mentioned, the right portions were co-opted quickly and refashioned into an arm of neoconservatism. The left was popularly (though not ideologically) discredited or otherwise neutered by reliance on reluctant liberal "allies". The proof is in the rightward march of American policy in the interim.

And THAT narrative was created by Gamergater grifters. IT was even less true than whatever you might find flawed in GP.

That's mostly because what "comes in" has been deliberately reduced. US, apart from the ludicrous health system, doesn't seem to spend much more than other western countries.

Exactly. Even Trump, whose main policy promise was reducing spending, is currently 12% over budget (4% budget increase requested from congress + 8% that he's actually overspent so far)

With incentives, actual numbers matter. So yes, speed trap towns have bad incentives, but for national governments fines going to general revenue does not cause a problem even if in principle it is a bad incentive.

In my country, local authorities are often accused of using parking fines as revenue, but the police are rarely accused of seizing for gain. As an unofficial punishment yes, but not for gain.

Seized property should be held in a neutral escrow account until the case is adjudicated, and then automatically returned to the victim if they are not convicted of a crime within a reasonable time.

Perhaps distributing among a large list of charities would be better. “A large list” would help prevent gaming the system with police / fire charities or something.

Why not have the revenue go to victims of crime? Setup a general fund so that judges can allocate recovered funds to help the worst affected.

Because then some people make a career out of causing crimes.

> Because then some people make a career out of causing crimes.

I don't really follow you. Are you suggesting that the victims fund would over-compensate victims so that they make a profit from being robbed etc?

Currently, lots of people do make a career out of causing crimes - we call them criminals.

Speed traps catch people actually committing crimes. While you as a driver may be disappointed you can't speed (read: break the law) with impunity, I as a pedestrian and public transit user would prefer more speed traps and harsher enforcement.

On the other hand, what happened in the linked article appears to be the FBI seizing the women's assets with approximately zero evidence she committed a crime.

I'm not sure that violating a speed limit going abruptly from 100 to 10, with the sign hidden behind a bush, and without any apparent reason for the limit to be changed is anything else than a scheme to collect money.

This is why, IMO, municipalities should have no ability to set their own speed limits. They should be specified by a disinterested third-party engineer at design time and be immutable without physically changing the road, or certain aspects of the road’s use (building a school, for example).

Or evidence that the existing speed limit is unsafe (e.g. good arguments, car accidents) and should not have been set in the first place.

Afraid not. Most regular traffic is aware of speed traps, it will slow down in the zone and speed up right after to make up time.

It's far more effective to lower the road's natural speed by introducing curves, roundabouts, rumble strips, flexible barriers and speed bumps.

Current civil engineering best practices is that if a sufficient amount of traffic is violating the limit the limit is what's wrong. Several states use methods consistent with this to set their speed limits generally. Many do not.

Regardless, this is a distraction. Law is the codification of acceptable behavior. Rules that come with force of law should not substantially deviate from what average people consider acceptable.

Furthermore, these sorts of bad laws aren't just limited to property seizure and speeding. From federal tax law to municipal zoning these is no shortage of these sorts of laws, rules with force of law and precedents that are crafted in such a manner as to give the enforcers unilateral power to take as they please and with checks limits generally only existing not to prevent abuse but to prevent the enforcers from getting so greedy that their racket gets outlawed. All examples of such laws and rules are bad and ought to be done away with.

Thank you for illustrating exactly what one of the enablers of these sorts of bad policies looks like. I will leave imagining what a similar argument in favor of civil asset forfeiture looks like as an exercise for the reader.

> Law is the codification of acceptable behavior.

Good luck lobbying the town to change the speed limit. They don't care what you think about the limit, if you drive past that speed you'll have to pay.

And just to rant a bit: as someone who lives on a too-straight street (but very local and with pedestrians, including, children, walking on often) where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit because they probably think they know best what's "acceptable", I would love them to get hefty fines every time they did it.

The problem is that the road design doesn't fit its usage. In an ideal world the street would be redesign so the driver naturally adopt the desired speed limit.

To add to this, "redesigned" doesn't have to mean making it less straight but cheaper things like making it narrower will also slow down traffic.

The problem is with the road, not the drivers. My city has re-engineered many roads that used to have four lanes into two lane roads with a middle left turn lane along with roundabouts or curbs that ‘narrow’ the road at intersections which makes drivers slow down. Roads where traffic used to move at 45 MPH now moves at 30 MPH.

Go to city council meetings and demand that the road is re-engineered instead of blaming drivers.

The road has speed bumpers already. Most streets in my area have a narrow section through which only one car can pass, so drivers going in either direction have to negotiate going through, but my street doesn't. So, drivers know very well they should keep the speed down, but unfortunately outside of making it physically impossible to go faster, people just can't help themselves doing it. It's very telling of human nature. I do think we need to blame those drivers going over anyway. Yes, people should be held accountable and be counted on fucking holding back their foot when on a small, narrow local street. This discourse that it's not the driver's fault is incredibly dishonest. Yes it is.

>And just to rant a bit: as someone who lives on a too-straight street (but very local and with pedestrians, including, children, walking on often) where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit because they probably think they know best what's "acceptable", I would love them to get hefty fines every time they did it.

Once again, you're doing a great job illustrating how we got to the status quo we have. You're littering in the park, ideologically speaking. You want heavy handed enforcement on your pet issue. Like litter it's not a problem a a few people do it but when you multiply by every other shortsighted person who does the same and the end result is the political will to allow law enforcement to get away with beyond the pale behavior like in TFA.

> They don't care what you think about the limit

The outcome for greedy, corrupt towns who enjoy profiting by abusing the law is DEATH: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio#Dissolution

So perhaps, for their own survival, they should care what their victims think, and not abuse their position.

> as someone who lives on a too-straight street [...] where dickheads constantly drive well past the limit

Then fix the street. Modern design codes call for chicanes and street furniture to narrow the street. When streets are narrow, drivers naturally slow down.

A straight, wide road with a low speed limit is like a door with a handle and a sign saying "push" - and you want to fine anyone who intuitively pulls the handle.

Speed traps are frequently paired with abrupt and arbitrary changes to the speed limit which exist for the purpose of the speed trap. People who go fast through those are technically breaking the law, but morally they're doing nothing wrong (unless you're the kind of servile worm who derives morality from the law.)

I've never seen any strong evidence for this (only a handful of anecdotes), and my personal experience driving doesn't match. I saw speed traps all the time and don't remember a single one that was associated with a speed limit change.

Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit.

You are being wilfully obtuse.

https://www.al.com/news/2022/01/police-in-this-tiny-alabama-...

https://reason.com/2022/05/08/11-insanely-corrupt-speed-trap...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/speed-trap-profits-could-come-e...

> Waldo, Florida, is just two square miles, and Highway 301 runs right through the village, but the highway speed limit changed six times, enabling police to write thousands of tickets a year. The AAA put up a billboard warning drivers.

It's the responsibility of town planners, etc. to design roads and their speed limits for safe traffic flow. Sudden speed limit changes are dangerous, and a much safer approach - if, say, a highway runs through a village for two miles, with multiple junctions - is to have a single speed limit for the entire stretch. Not to have speed ups and slow downs, aggressive enforcement, and evidence that the majority of your village's funding comes from fines. That is municipal malfeasance.

Here’s a Propublica article about a Louisiana town that exists financially from traffic fines.

https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...

>> Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit.

That's not how driving actually works in practice. Most of the time drivers rely on a learned sense of what the standard speed limit is based on the type of road. E.g. highways are 65 - 70, major roads are about 55, neighborhoods are 25 - 35, etc. When I learned to drive, the state's drivers manual literally had a section on what speed limit you should assume on different types of road if you haven't seen a sign.

That's to say nothing of situations where the sign is actually hidden. For example, I was once pulled over on a road that abruptly dropped more than 25 mph, on a significant downward slope, where a tree was growing in front of the speed limit sign.

Did you fight it? The tree should have gotten your ticket thrown out.

Then it wasn’t a speed trap. Just running radar is not a speed trap, it’s enforcement.

Speed traps are as described by others: abrupt, significant changes in speed limit with minimal warning and poorly-visible signage.

Look up the story of Waldo, Florida, which for years and years did this on US 301. The town lies on the main route between Gainesville, location of the University of Florida, and Jacksonville, where it meets I-95 and thus access to points north along the East Coast. It was one of the few places that the American Automobile Association would directly call out as a speed trap.

I know that Alabama has had a series of laws starting in the 90s passed by the state legislature to rein in such activity. Not entirely successful, but not without its victories, either.

Large jumps should be plainly illegal, and bad visibility of signage should be a defense in the court.

This has to be legislated at the state level, though, or the municipalities will go wild in their policing for profit.

These always slide by because the cost of defending yourself in court is enormous even if you have a completely simple case that anyone with a modicum of intelligence could handle. You can’t do it remotely.

I've also never personally been to NYC or Antartica, thus neither of these places really exists.

when you assert that something exists, it is generally expected that you would point at documented examples. for example, consumer protection organisations, or petrol lobbies, etc might have an interest in documenting those things. do those documents exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Rome,_Ohio#

The south catches a bad rap for speed trap towns but seems like every 10yr or so some town in the midwest abolishes its police department or something because of that sort of behavior.

once every ten years doesn't sound as bad as the others have been making it out to be.

The equivalent in my area are "bus gates" i.e. lanes at junctions reserved for buses during certain periods that automatically generate fines.

In principle, great, but the trick is that the signage is such an inscrutable combination of badly placed adhoc signs and road-markings that a huge number of visitors with zero intent to breach a rule get fined.

There is a common sense principle such things should meet: if the revenue from a traffic measure is high and consistent then not only has it failed in it's purpose to change behaviour but there is something bogus about it's setup.

A judge first ruled the signage was fine but after seeing so many appeals, he admitted he had been definitively proven wrong and it needed to be improved.

> Additionally, even if the speed limit is changed, assuming there is appropriate signage it is your responsibility to follow the speed limit.

Legally, of course. But there is such a thing as an artificially low speed limit. If the road conditions allow driving in safety at 60 km/h but a town installs a sign that says that you have to drive at 10 km/h, with no pedestrian traffic or bends or anything at all that could justify it, then that is a speed trap, and drivers who drive the normal speed of 60 on that stretch are not doi g anything wrong, the law is just being abused against them.

So I see people saying this all the time, but they forget one crucial factor - noise. Roads next to houses have lower speed limit not just because of people on the road or sharp turns, but because cars driving faster generate more noise(exponentially more noise in fact).

In Czechia, the maximal jump between two signs is, AFAIK, 30 km/h, so as not to require abrupt braking.

You have never driven through Utah. My one and only speeding ticket ever was when the speed limit changed from 55 to 30, and the sign was behind a turn and a cop was right there who grabbed me immediately. Of course the speed limit went back up to 55 about 100 feet after that. I hyper noticed this BS everywhere since.

This is actually the same reason why I'm surprised when anyone that is into bitcoin likes the idea of the federal strategic reserve. The government specifically saying they won't buy any, they'll just put any seized bitcoin into the reserve to be used later.

Why would anyone like that the government created an incentive to seize more bitcoin?

If the government holds seized bitcoin as opposed to selling it, that will tend to increase the price.

I guess that's why, though the government would then have an incentive to seize as much as it can legally seize.

It'd be one thing if the bitcoin was just thrown in a hole or destroyed. A strategic reserve is a financial asset though, the government will want to grow that fund to help fund pet projects while running a ridiculous deficit.

The government effectively prints money at will; it doesn't need bitcoin. This is an attempt by the current administration to curry favor with people who like bitcoin.

today the government prints money at will, that can change. They will be creating a new federal power with a strategic reserve, it will get abused eventually.

Actually, this fund is THE money printer. Ever increasing in value, not directly usable but great for accounting. It can be used to balance real spending.

imo people who understand bitcoin and its purpose don’t want government to buy it for strategic reserve. That said if you hold your own keys then bitcoin protects you from this type of abuse of power

Holding your own keys would help avoid seizure, but assuming the state already has enough access to reliably track the current owner of any btc they could still come after you regardless of where the keys are.

They also could prevent you from using the btc in any non-private transaction. Companies are required to know their customers, it wouldn't be hard for them to be forced to block specific bitcoin hashes. You could still trade it privately, but it would effectively be gray money and should be worth less.

Interesting scenario. If a government can tie a specific person to a specific wallet, they don't need the keys to go forward with whatever they want to do with that info.

I wonder if the FBI can proclaim a certain wallet is yours and you did some bad thing so you have to surrender those coins. Without the private key, they can't forcefully confiscate your coins. But I wonder if they can say "If any coins leave that wallet, we'll take retaliatory action!".

I would expect that a scenario where they could legally confiscate your coins is also a scenario where they could legally arrest and charge you with a crime. Confiscation of money is likely the least of your concerns there.

The government could gain valuable intel from bitcoin addresses all the way back to the Mt Gox scandal. They would have only gotten more access since then, especially with legitimate businesses operating as exchanges that follow KYC regulations.

There's such an odd deference to the perpetrator's chosen language here.

If I go take someone's wallet, I don't get to get away with calling it a "seizure", "forfeiture", or "revenue". It'd be called theft or robbery, and I'd go to prison.

There's something infantile about how we go along with the state's fictions and pretenses rather than just calling their wording of "civil forfeiture" by its natural wording of "robbery".

I think the origin of this the formation of "district attorneys", followed by only allowing them to prosecute, as well as professional police forces. This is a sharp deviation from and degradation of common law, which used to allow anyone to initiate a prosecution against anyone, and which levied the responsibility of law enforcement on everyone.

> If I go take someone's wallet, I don't get to get away with calling it a "seizure", "forfeiture", or "revenue". It'd be called theft or robbery, and I'd go to prison.

I'm a Federal Employee, not a LEO. If I take someone's wallet, I can claim qualified immunity.

https://ij.org/press-release/supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-c...

I'm totally comfortable with calling the OP's experience robbery. I used the word "seizure" because my comment is about what the law allows, not this case in particular.

For the US I think all fines and seized money should go to the social security administration.

> Seizures allowed to be kept by the organisation doing the seizing is a terrible incentive.

In a country where tips at restaurants are not only socially accepted but actually expected, this seems "expected behavior" as well, in my opinion.

>The warrant, which agents misled a judge to obtain,

A huge fraction of FBI missteps that make the news involve this fact pattern but it's never actually what causes the misstep to blow up and make the news. You don't need to know statistics to know what this implies about the prevalence of said fact pattern.

We're also supposed to trust the secret FISA courts are honest and self policing.

The warrant explicitly limited the search and forbade a search of the deposit boxes. They not only ignored that but seized items in boxes they were specifically told not to search. How are these agents free from criminal charges?

> How are these agents free from criminal charges?

Because they investigate themselves?

I remember reading an article where they showed up with money counting machines and evidence techs to process the loot.

They 100% knew what they were doing and thought there would be no repercussions because only criminals "hide" assets in private vaults.

Because the rules aren't really the rules, they are window dressing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good-faith_exception

Search Lexus/Nexus for 'Good faith'. A lot of searches, failure to protect chain of custody, etc just get allowed because 'good faith'.

Civil asset forfeiture is legalized theft.

Worse, it should be slam-dunk unconstitutional (unreasonable search and seizure, due process) but thus far courts have done what they do most of the time: sided with law enforcement. The legal justification is so laughably bogus too ("the money has no rights"... yeah but who does that money belong to?).

The USA is post-Constitutional. There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the government to create the FBI and therefore the 10th should apply. As the FBI does exist, along with all of the other alphabet soup agencies, we can see that the Constitution no longer truly holds power.

Who would enforce federal laws if there were no federal law enforcement agencies?

Historically, a sherrif. Later, local police departments.

The states?

  In the early days of the U.S., the first federal criminal code, the Crimes Act of 1790, enumerated 23 federal offenses and established punishments for each.

The states can't be compelled to enforce federal laws though can they? Isn't that how like sanctuary cities work? Or how weed is legal in some states but illegal federally? States can decline to assist federal law enforcement.

They can if they want to, but can't be compelled to do so. If a state decides that a federal law won't be enforced by them, then it shouldn't be enforced in that state period. Federal law enforcement are worse than the gangsters they were created to fight.

So things like civil rights would depend on the state you're in?

Well, today, they can refuse.

Historically, they couldn’t. George Washington was willing to use military force to enforce law.

Could you elaborate a bit on what you mean about George Washington? When did this modern right of refusal come about?

According to the Constitution and precedence, federal laws are always the law of the land. States are supposed to need to prove that federal laws is unconstitutional, and they then wouldn’t be required to follow a federal law. Of course, a state could simply not enforce a federal law, but this is where the federal government can intervene. In the case of Washington, he used the army to enforce taxes on whiskey in Pennsylvania. Of course, he may not have been the biggest fan of using military force for policing, as he also established the US Marshals, but he was willing to use military force.

Regarding states ignoring federal laws, the first I know of resulted in New York v. United States in 1992 where the Court ruled that congress couldn’t require states to enact waste disposal regulations. In more recent history, Oklahoma voted to nullify the Affordable Care Act in 2013. The biggest shift, however, was in marijuana legalization across the country. According to the federal government, pot is illegal. States have explicitly made laws stating the opposite. I can find nothing else quite like it in US history. This is different from previous cases where the states challenged a law on legal grounds. Here, they just ignored the federal government entirely.

You made my point for me. States were always free to refuse to enforce federal law, and the federal government needed an enforcement arm at least for that case, be it the military, marshals, or DEA.

Almost every cabinet level department ALSO has its own US Marshals already.

Fines and seizures that skirt the protections afforded to defendants in criminal cases by being penalties for civil infractions are legalized theft.

Civil asset forfeiture is a blatant violation of the 4th so depending on how exactly the seizure went down the laws of the jurisdiction it's larceny, robbery, armed robbery, etc.

But people give the government too much benefit of the doubt hence the discussion being anchored around "legal theft".

I contend that every judge, politician and law enforcement officer who's ever signed off on this idea is involved in a criminal conspiracy, in every colloquial sense of the term.

The whole idea would moot the fourth amendment.

The whole of youth protection services and law enforcement for an entire state got caught running such a racket, imprisoning kids for money from the state, with the judges receiving kickbacks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Needless to say, although the criminal records for these kids got expunged (after 15 years, WAY too late and didn't mean anything anymore, and already had caused maximum damage on these kids' lives), no restitution was paid (yes kids have a criminal record. It just gets blanked on their 18th birthday)

Needless to say, the actual crime the state, the judges, a private detention facility, public school employees, and ... participated in was kidnapping and abusing 2401 kids for a combined 380 years. The normal restitution payment for wrongful imprisonment is $50,000 per year, or in this case the state would normally owe these kids 19 million dollars, or about 8,000 dollar per kid (average). NOTHING was paid by the state for imprisoning kids through corruption for decades (plural). Oh and the private detention facility not only got to keep all the money, they are still in business.

If a private person had committed such a crime, holding 2401 kids for a combined 380 years, the punishment would obviously be unimaginable. Hell, such a case would make people would ask "is there a death penalty in Pennsylvania?" (there is)

The punishment for public servants? Everyone involved went free except one of the judges (he did not just corruptly imprison kids, he committed tax evasion), 3 people lost their jobs, and everyone kept all money that had changed hands.

They can all be judges again. The ONE person that got imprisoned retired in Florida (one of the 3 judges, the one that did not just hurt kids, but also committed tax fraud). He was physically attacked many times, even in Florida. He moved to Florida because the police in Pennsylvania after the first few attacks refused to file charges against his attackers, even when they involved week-long hospital recovery stays.

I utterly hate Trump, but it's relevant to add: Biden pardoned him.

So when you say "judge", is this the sort of people you are talking about? When you say "politician" would that be the state legislature members that voted a law specifically to exempt everyone from prosecution in this case (that's why only the tax fraud judge got "imprisoned")? And when you say "law enforcement officers", do you mean the people that helped and committed violence against kids to safeguard the money?

I say that, because this was declared, by elected officials, to NOT be a criminal conspiracy. In fact they voted in a law SPECIFICALLY to make sure this could not be considered a criminal conspiracy. So your standards need adjusting.

Frankly, as soon as you look into it, you're going to find that governments see law as something that applies to other people, not to them. Not in small things. Not in large things. And once you see this, you will notice the small things constantly (like public vs private busses behavior, to name something so small it's almost ridiculous, yet obviously it's constant crimes) ...

And, of course, this was not the only state this happened.

Let me remind you that the judge in that scandal is a free man thanks to the President of the United States.

In my opinion the state, and the republican government that installed this atrocity is responsible, and voting themselves out of even the minimal normal restitution payment had they done this to adults are the people in the center of that scandal, and of course voting their party members free from criminal persecution.

And this is pretty much the entire republican party of Pennsylvania. Still. There's hardly any young (even if you define young as 40 or 50) people in, frankly, either party.

The pardon was granted by a Democratic president. This isn't a partisan issue. It's legalized corruption

And strangely enough, by the last President! Not even this fresh new one that we expect all the bizarre pardons from. That one was a Joe Biden classic.

Say what you want about "Nonviolent offender leniency", but occasionally nonviolent offenses are quantitatively and qualitatively more despicable than most violent offenses.

Killed a rival gang member? That's one thing. Improperly sent thousands of children to prison under color of authority, jeopardizing the legitimacy of the justice system in the process? I think that's one of those things that should be a hanging offense.

For better or worse, that old case ( yes, it is a 4 year old case ) made circles in finance, banking and aml communities. At the time, I did not hear much of a 'it has gone far enough'. Quite the contrary, if you are listening to what is happening in that realm, you have to look no further than US bank ( only singling them out, because they quite openly say it ) and their push towards greater 'information sharing' and 'partnerships'. It is not getting better.

The problem here is nobody will be fired and no one will go to jail for this. It’s like the government is suing itself and paying its own fine to itself.

For cases like this a corporation or government body should not be allowed to be an abstraction. The right thing to do is not go after corporations but individuals. It’s unfortunate we don’t do this and I think we should.

I always thought it should go one step further. If I'm a government official (politician, judge, police officer, etc) and I commit a crime the damage goes much beyond the damage that would have been incurred if a private citizen had done the same. It undermines societies faith in the system as a while which is ultimately so much worse. The punishments should be accordingly.

You've hit the nail on the head. A huge number of the problems in society today stem from how acting for a government or corporation allows people to get away with doing bad things that they'd be punished for it acting as an individual.

It's about aligning incentives effectively. The fear of jail time for incorrect behavior will work better than anything else.

Could be worse.

You could be kidnapped to a foreign torture prison and your head shaved by the federal government.

Just because you have a tattoo they insist is gang related but is actually just a disability symbol.

No hearing, no representation, just disappeared into another country you have no association with.

Those 250 people they sold to that infamous El Salvador prison? Yeah they've been going through them and they keep finding people that had no gang association.

The FBI needs to be shut down. It was formed for a specific purpose that has long since gone away, but continues to accumulate employees, money, and power endlessly, like a cancer.

The article conveniently leaves out USPV was a major money laundering and drug distrbution point and all the contents were seized by warrant in the furtherance of the investigation.

It appears the owners are cooperating with the FBI and the org plead out.

https://beverlypress.com/2022/03/beverly-hills-private-vault...

The original district court ruling upheld the FBI's proceures and it wasn't until 2024 that the 9th Ciruit reversed (some) of that ruling.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/judge-sides-with-fbi-in-86m-bever...

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-9th-circuit/115736960.h...

A major nitpick here. The contents of the safe deposit boxes were seized __without__ warrant -- which the warrant did not include. Once they had her money the FBI argued it was civil asset forfeiture.

USPV may have been a criminal organization, but if you enter into a contract with such a group, typically you wouldn't know it's a criminal organization.

I guess you could call up the FBI and say, "Hey I'm going to open a safe deposit box account with USPV. Are you guys actively investigating them?" And if you do that, they will probably not answer you if there is an ongoing criminal investigation.

Oh there's lots of nits to pick on this case and the 9th Circuit dug into some of it.

The original warrant stated that it was for "inventorying" the contents for the purposes of an investigation (preserving evidence). They grossly exceeded the scope fo the warrant and now have to deal with 17 lawsuits if I remember correctly.

I abhor civil asset forfeiture as it is set up today. I remember all the fights over it in 1980s over the drug lords, but it had a lot of public support back then and it still does to some extent.

Personal anecdote: I almost had several thousand in cash seized on I-70 in Ohio. It's legal but grey and it happens. Good luck getting your cash back. Only thing that saved my money (actually my grandfathers estate... I was selling his vintage stereo gear in Kentucky) was me being white, not sketchy, and being active military. But only barely. There may or may not been a $100 that got miscounted.

This is why I recommend people look into Monero (a cryptocurrency) as a form of currency and savings. I've had my bank accounts frozen for no reason and I don't trust this system anymore.

The whole concept makes no sense at all. Sickening.

Civil asset forfeiture needs to go.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a sort of bank or a financial system where money couldn’t be moved without the owner’s explicit permission? Like, at all. Perhaps the rules could be enforced with code, and with digital signatures required for any ledger changes. Would be nice if it were globally distributed in a p2p fashion with no government having a say.

If only such a system existed.

That works great until the user's explicit permission is coerced or scammed out of them. In those situations it's nice to have the protections of a conventional financial system.

Those protections exist with significant limitations in the conventional financial system. See the widespread abuse of Zelle as an example.

Agreed.

But wouldn't it be nice to have a choice?

The rules would be enforced with a gun, same as they are now.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/538/

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