How the DEA took a young man’s life savings without charging him with a crime
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
We've moved away from a society where the police were there to truly protect and serve the community (think 1950's/60's beat cop walking the blocks during his shift) to a totalitarian police state (constant erosion of the 4th amendment, nexus centers, sweeping overreaches of the third party doctrine, stingrays, and mass deployment of license plate scanners). Big Brother would be proud.
HB 560, introduced by New Mexico Rep. Zachary Cook and passed unanimously in the legislature, replaces civil asset forfeiture with criminal forfeiture, which requires a conviction of a person as a prerequisite to losing property tied to a crime. The new law means that New Mexico now has the strongest protections against wrongful asset seizures in the country.
Link to the bill:
http://www.nmlegis.gov/Sessions/15%20Regular/final/HB0560.pd...
"But New Mexico's law only affects state law enforcement officials. As a result, in New Mexico — and everywhere else, for that matter — DEA agents will be able to board your train, ask you where you're going and take all your cash if they don't like your story, all without ever charging you with a crime."
There are supposed to be other protections for this. The sixth amendment, for instance, says: "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial...", which means that they can't just "let you rot in jail."
In practice, though, sometimes you do rot in jail. :/
That varies from state to state. In my state, the District Attorney just has to get you to trial within a year of your arrest.
Not showing up to work for a year because you couldn't afford bail can have a negative impact on one's finances, to say the least.
That's a long time to spend in jail - a location where you have no real freedoms.
Which you will then start to sell off so you can afford the legal defense required to fight the false charges. A person can be found innocent of all charges but still be wiped out financially from defending themselves. That's called "justice".
And say the false charge was one with a social stigma, say child molestation. Now not only are you financially wiped out, not only have you lost your job, but your name is now tied with a crime which people will often not care if you were found not guilty (or even found innocent). And the only thing you can do to stop it is to say a prayer that you aren't going to be the next one wrongly charged.
We've moved away from a society where the police were
there to truly protect and serve the community (think
1950's/60's beat cop walking the blocks during his
shift) to a totalitarian police state (constant erosion
of the 4th amendment, nexus centers, sweeping
overreaches of the third party doctrine, stingrays, and
mass deployment of license plate scanners). Big Brother
would be proud.
You do realize that Martin Luther King Jr. was under watch by FBI Plants his entire public life, and warrantlessly spied upon under COINTELPRO?
You do realize that Fred Hampton was drugged by an FBI Plant, before 40+ Police raided his home and shot him dead with automatic weapons as he slept? (also part of COINTELPRO program)
The problems of policing are the same problems that have occurred for years. There were _always_ good cops who did their business correctly, there have _always_ been bad cops who have abused the system. As for the system... obviously it is constantly under flux, but I do think we're making improvements over the long run.
I argue that today's system is superior to the 1950s. Anyone who disagrees with me is welcome to offer the first blow in a debate here and now. But mind you, good luck beating out COINTELPRO... which was not only warrantless spying on innocent Americans... but also was involved in direct assassinations in broad daylight.
Its as if people have _completely_ forgotten about 1950s history. Red Scare? COINTELPRO? Civil Rights? Black Panthers getting assassinated by police? Lynching in the streets? McCarthyism? House Un-American Activities Committee? The Office of Censorship?
These American institutions were shut down as the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1960s.
Good gosh people. Life is better today. Not perfect... but better by all measurements. Learn some history, and stop pretending that the 1950s were a peaceful time. In the 1950s, you'd lose your job if
lol maybe if you're white
welcome to the logic that everyone has had to operate under
But I'm being pedantic. I do agree with the spirit of your comment - it is vital that we immediately divide along race lines, lest any actual change take place.
Civil forfeiture is a major problem but the abuse of using administrative law judges (ALJs) is becoming a big one as well.
Is this all jaw-jaw and no action?
http://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fil...
Shame on you.
Edit: downvotes deserved. I read it several times and still interpreted the first paragraph to be in support of taking money because it denied full legal access. My brain flipped a word into "good". Despite being a public defender no less! Leaving comment anyways because that seems like the honest thing to do. Sorry.
What was described in this article is called stealing or theft. To call it anything else is to mask and downplay what was done to this man. It is to enable the very act that was committed.
George Carlin observed this as a dangerous trend in our language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc
Call it "civil forfeiture" once if you have to (perhaps as a footnote). But to repeatedly use such "soft language" is to delay an end to such injustice.
I hope we continue to see a relentless stream of articles highlighting these cases one after another until finally the outcry builds loud enough for something substantive to be done at the federal level. It's to the point where we need an 'Audit the Fed' level response to scrutinize every dollar seized, and victims should be compensated in full, with interest.
I wonder how the story would have gone differently if the man had refused to consent to the search. Probably not much better, heck, that would probably be considered 'evidence' against his money.
I also wonder what the burden of proof is for showing the source of the funds. If you walk into court with bank statements and W-2s, why is it so hard to get the money back? Judges are obstructing this for some reason, and I think that's an angle to the story we haven't seen much reported.
So. At this point you're not a party to the proceeding, so you can't do any of the normal things you'd do if the DEA was suing you, and you certainly don't have the presumption of innocence you'd have in criminal court. You have to petition the court to be involved in your own case. Because your money is just sitting there not doing much to defend itself. Once you're officially involved, the burden of proof is on you to show you came by the cash honestly.
I used to play a lot of relatively high stakes poker. Guys I played with would be carrying a fair amount of cash (more than the subject of this story), and it was common knowledge if you got robbed it would most likely be by the cops.
The gallows humor around the table was "So when their investigation turns up nothing you ask if they'll be returning your money. 'No,' they explain."
Probably taze the guy, then shoot him 7 times in the back as he runs off
They just took it.
>In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120106011107/http://www.k-1.co...
I respectfully disagree that it's indefensible. It was either 100,000 Japanese civilians in those 2 cities OR million or more American casualties. AND if the invasion had taken place, millions and millions of Japanese civilians would've died also.
I agree, with proper PR language, anything can be made look half decent and therefore tolerable.
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Good to see, that the US are capable of learning from history by importing great achievements and ideas of former times from the old world.
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"nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.""
"Civil asset forfeiture" precisely resembles the worst caricature of the behavior we were attempting to defend against when we wrote that. And it's affecting everybody going through police jurisdictions that rely on that revenue, not just the minorities that the drug war was designed to persecute in order to get Reagan & Bush Sr re-elected.
I understand some of the politics of why the executive and the legislature ramped this up - perceptions that a generation of children was being lost to a class of sinister urban drug-pushers, and a desire for vigilante justice even when we couldn't convict them of anything. I don't understand how any judge anywhere could approve any of it. They're supposed to be above that. If you accept these legal fictions into your worldview, what's the point of having a justice system at all?
This should have been ended decades ago, when hysteria about the 'crack epidemic' wore down. As far as I'm concerned, when a local cop steals money from you and claims he has a form that says that's okay, that's a reason for the FBI or Internal Affairs to come in and prosecute that person. Because they stopped being a legitimate representative of the people in any capacity: they stopped shepherding law-abiding citizens and started feeding on them. We used to have a word for that, 'dirty cops', and we used to believe, or at least hope, they were aberrations.
Have you not noticed the names they put on bills to get them through Congress (state or federal)? Right to Work? No Child Left Behind? DOMA, Internet Freedom Act. Hell, the Affordable Care Act (I SAID IT, sue me!)
These guys have it figured out, and when we figure it out they just change tactics. If they're that brazenly Orwellian on the title page how can they not be spending time softening the text in the middle?
The circumstances under which your property can be taken are incredibly overreaching and unfair. There have been situations where people have had their homes taken away for ridiculous situations like this one: http://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/08/26/p...
We need to get rid of these laws entirely or at the very least, make it a more fair playing field. The authorities should be expected to bring some evidence to the table, not assume guilty until proven innocence.
The DEA is looking out for our safety by implementing this well-intentioned protocol... If the government didn't, who would hold our money accountable for the criminal behavior it's been involved in? Just look at the facts... almost 80% of bills have touched drugs! Appalling!
And they're transparent about the process--they put that filthy money on trial even though it keeps refusing to talk. Enough 'shock and awe' from our DA's and I know we'll get there eventually... We need harsher sentencing guidelines!!
[United States vs. $1,058.00 of U.S. Currency](https://casetext.com/case/united-states-v-105800-in-us-curre...)
I certainly sleep better at night knowing that the currency loitering in my pocket doesn't get a pass on its delinquent past just because it's an inanimate object...
Criminals have a large body of very smart people working for them to develop new creative ways or hiding money flows across different legal entities and different jurisdictions. These people don't travel with cash. You won't even find out their names.
These laws don't help with serious offenders just catch some small fish on occasion and also terrorize ordinary innocent people.
In the case of black markets, yes, there is a great deal of obfuscation, however on a civil level and in business with the tax code it essentially creates an "arms race of precedent" in the courts, wherein those with capital exploit loopholes in the legal system to establish new precedents that can circumvent any spirit of the law for decades to come. In most cases I see this as a positive thing, but when state and federal prosecutors use this against civilians, it can have some truly ridiculous outcomes.
Speaking to your comment about the black market specifically, though, I raised this concern when Obama signed that executive notice last month pertaining to individuals on the SDN list--as a hypothetical, if someone on that list were to have a criminal enterprise, and if that criminal enterprise was using a legitimate merchant processing account to obfuscate funds (as per your "ways of hiding money"), then ANYONE who had ever processed a credit-card transaction with that account would be liable to have their assets frozen indefinitely and with impunity by the US government.
Dangerous precedent indeed.
Certainly putting all of their assets into escrow and only allowing access for approved uses (like say legal fees) would achieve the same results without pissing all over the sixth amendment.
Where do we draw the line?
Yes, actually. It's a standard tactic that was used in, eg, the prosecution of Michael Milken.
It's also nice if you can get some kind of tax angle going so you can threaten the target's wife as well.
Steve Jackson Games? Delorean?
You have a major problem with your presumption of guilt.
Whatever happened to "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"? I know that has origins in English Law but the Founding Fathers considered it to be so important it figures heavily in the Bill of Rights.
[1] http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2014/03/civil-asset... [2] https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-po...
Things in the US are not nearly as bad as in third world countries. They're bad, they're serious, but third world (or whatever you want to call Russia and China) problems are really in a league of their own. Dubai is in a different league than NYC / SF.
In the US, you can talk about it, you can get a lawyer, you can have newspaper articles written. Many third world countries - nope. There may be a couple of bloggers but they tend to get arrested.
Again, I'm not saying these things in the US are OK. I'm just saying it's unrealistic to say Manhattan is like Dubai, or NSA is like Chinese internet monitors/hackers. Really - not even close.
And is this helping Joseph Rivers, a victim of shameless organised theft and institutional racism?
The "most people are unaffected" argument, which gets trotted out a lot, has a strong reek of the Martin Niemøller idea: ( http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392 )
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out— Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Speak out, god damn it, if you have an ounce of freedom left in your blood! How can you sit idly by and make excuses and diminish the problem while your fellow man is being trampled by a ruling class of armoured thugs and liars? Is this what America was built on? That's not what you claim in your movies.
If you're making excuses for how this sort of despicable crap is "not that big a problem", you need to take a good, long look in the mirror and realise that you're currently part of the problem.
Every time an innocent has his rights trampled in this way, it is all of humanity that suffers. I am incensed on this person's behalf, and shocked and disappointed that this person's compatriots take it so lightly.
I'm pretty sure it was.
- Calling my local representative (Someone on the other end of the line thanks me and then politely dismisses me saying they'll pass it along). - Trying to inform friends and family (They don't really care for many of the reasons stated above)
I think apathetic is a good descriptor for my current state of mind around things like this. Any effort I've put into large scale change in the past has felt like spinning my wheels and generally decreased my overall happiness due to general frustration. Letting go of caring about politics was a major happiness/satisfaction increase in my generall well-being.
Yes, it seems like giving up. But then over time the more smart, educated, likely wealthy people leave the US and take residence somewhere less objectionable, the less economically competitive the US will be. Eventually it will decline.
At the very least, you'll know that you weren't one of the people contributing to sustaining this system. It might seem like a drop in the ocean, but, as the conclusion of Cloud Atlas puts it, what is the ocean but a multitude of drops?
There are lawyers in this thread that claim cases where civil forfeiture is done to prevent the individual getting a lawyer.
Of course this probably doesn't happen in reality...
The problem is, you must be able to afford a lawyer. If the legal process of defending oneself is only available to the rich, then it largely does no exist for the general population.
America admits to torture and does nothing.
America has a kill list that only the executive presides over and keeps secret.
We've killed hundreds of thousands of civilians over the last decade and displaced millions.
And yet here is a presumptuous America ready to claim moral superiority over Russians and Chinese. A horrific display of Orwellian doublethink.
You can't see online news articles negative of Chinese leadership, in China, they're taken down or blocked for the entire country.
This is not "doublethink", this is just being realistic. China and Russian are, objectively, way way worse. If you don't see that, you've lost touch with reality.
You simply state China and Russia are far worse but present no evidence.
America has killed hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians over the last 12 years.
America holds people in indefinite prison without trial and even admits that they are innocent but continues to lock them away.
We torture people. We have secret kill lists. Our police rob citizens without punishment. Our politicians openly flaunt the law and go unpunished, as do bankers and large corporations.
Anything to support your view beyond mere assertion and blind allegiance?
The civil forfeitures problem is non-trivial, but you're drastically exaggerating. The whole of the US has a very highly functional, low-corruption judiciary system, and a mostly still intact and strong property rights system.
Most of America is low crime, low corruption, the opposite of what you're implying. In fact it's because of that, that most Americans are unaware of what organizations like the DEA are doing.
The US is less corrupt than France for example:
Careful there. The Transparency International page you link to is the perception index.
It measures what a set of people perceives corruption to be like in each country, and composits results from a number of different surveys in a way that as far as I know is not benchmarked against other data to verify if survey results actually matches reality.
You can not use it as a measure of how corrupt a country actually is. It's likely that it's an indicator when the numbers are very far apart, or that it can be used to spot trends in a country over time, but the relatively small difference between France and the US seems unlikely to be sufficient to draw any conclusions.
7% of people who interacted with the police report paying a bribe to them? 11% for education I could believe, but 15% to the judiciary, 17% to "land services"?
Maybe I just need to step my bribe game up, but that seems significantly higher than I would have expected.
[1] http://www.transparency.org/gcb2013/country/?country=united_...
Yes, because corruption has been legalized through corruption.
You can, as a rich person, or an enterprise, legally bride politicians so that they can pass laws for your own profit.
"low crime, low corruption".
Also remember that "no crime" has been committed in the 2008 financial crisis.
What has changed in that time, is now the government has vast economic controls at its disposal. If the government doesn't control the economy, you can't buy economic favors from them. When the US was still a very Capitalist nation at the start of the 20th century, in which the government had little control over the economy, political bribery would not get you very far when it comes to passing laws for your own profit.
To sum it up: political bribery is far more difficult today than it was 100 years ago, but now it can buy you a lot of things whereas before it could not, because of the substantial expansion of government control over the economy.
When it comes to the financial crisis, Western Europe committed many of the same financial 'crimes' you're referring to that, that the US did. The financial, banking and real estate boom and bust hit countries from Britain to France to Germany to Spain. What happened in the US was not unique to the US, the same things were going on in a lot of 'first world' nations.
The Fed stepped in and bailed out tons of European banks for example, the same as they did US banks.
It may not be legal to give politicians money, but it's totally legal to donate to their old expired campaign, and for them to then have the campaign repay the loan they gave it.
But the quid pro quo inherent in election financing ("If I make choice A, PAC #1234 will fund $5m of ads in my next campaign ... if I make choice B, I'll get a couple hundred checks from constituents at $50 each and PAC #1234 will run those $5m of ads against me") is much more insidious.
The practice of civil forfeiture on people who can't defend legally, like this guy, sure doesn't indicate that.
Maybe for the HSBC guys who laundered $378.4 billion over several years there will be a small fine, their profit for a few months. But no bank was forfeited. No board members were sent to jail for it. It seems property rights are solid, if you are rich.
The reason the US still ranks high on the low corruption index, is because you have to take the value of the whole, not just one small problem such as this.
It impacts an extraordinarily small percentage of Americans today, and the dollar sums are extraordinarily small in such a large economy. Put another way, on that 100 point corruption scale, the DEA program would represent a negative deduction of 2 or 3 points.
What's actually important here, is stopping it before it gets larger. If they don't stop it, it will get much bigger, and graduate from being a small problem to being a serious threat to the average citizen.
If we're talking about rights violations, civil forfeitures are a joke compared to the war on drugs for example and the incarceration that has been going on since the 1970s.
The title system is weak and outdated, and the mass fraud of "robosigning" (http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/false-affidavits-fore...) has not been adequately addressed.
When you have a country of 330 million people as large geographically as the US, it's very difficult as a citizen in one state, to be aware of what a national agency (the DEA) is doing across the entire nation, unless the national news outlets are writing about it.
While a typical American is going about their day to day life, living a local life (some town, in some county, in some state), the world's largest, most powerful federal / national government is aggressively attempting to undermine them in hundreds of ways large and small.
The US has a federal government that is financially the size of the entire economy of Germany, doing nothing but passing more laws, economic regulations, taxes, et al. to strangle liberty as much as they can and increase their power. There is very little else they do, or need to do. What does a beast that large do? Protect itself, entrench its own interests, grab more money, write more laws - there is nothing else for it to do most of the time.
Try doing something about that, or even thinking about how you can stop it, if you're an average citizen. It boggles the mind. Oh yeah, while you're at it, deal with the fact that the US military (which the NSA belongs to) is now increasingly taking aim at the US domestic population, you know, the world's most powerful military with a $600 billion budget.
Now compare this situation to the complexity faced by, say, Finland (5.4 million people) in trying to reign in or adjust its government system. The US has something like 200,000 pages of federal regulations; try fixing that, while the vast dedicated law passing machine is busy passing thousands of new regulations.
It isn't going to stop expanding and over-reaching until it crashes, choking itself to death.
In this case I'm confident we're going to see the forfeiture racket neutered in the next few years. It seems to have finally gotten large enough to draw serious Congressional and White House scrutiny to stop it.
It's similar to why the patent trolls are increasingly getting so much attention from D.C. 20 years ago when they were vastly smaller in their impact and scale, they simply didn't garner the attention of most pundits, journalists, politicians, etc. They didn't impact most businesses at all. Now they've become a vast parasite, and when the dollar drain on the US economy gets into the tens of billions, people start noticing.
The UK seems especially bad to me at the moment. The level of open surveillance that they practice on their citizens is astonishing.
People are only just starting to cotton on to this, but the Five Eyes are getting around the restrictions of not openly monitoring all their citizens by giving access to their surveillance systems to another member of the five and then just getting it handed straight back.
"Oh no, your honour, we don't monitor all our citizens."
The practice of civil forfeiture is being "allowed" by not doing anything about it or by giving it legitimacy by accepting it as something that should be reformed politically rather than treating it as a criminal violation of constitutional rights. Just because you get worked up about it for 15 minutes when reading an article about the injustice it causes doesn't mean that you aren't allowing it. Most people will unfortunately not even have a strong opinion about it until it happens to them or someone close to them.
[Citation needed]
Thanks.
Two things come to mind. We can compensate Joseph for his loss through his gofundme campaign.[0] But we can also start naming the thieves. One of the accomplices is reportedly "Sean [R.] Waite, agent-in-charge of the DEA’s Albuquerque office".[1] Who are the rest?
However, if you carry large amounts of cash, you're subject to warrantless seizure because of some sort of bizarre assumption that the only reason to opt out of the banking system is if you are a criminal.
It is analogous to the point a judge made in a case here: http://fourthamendment.com/?p=10373
"The submission of prescription information to the PDMP is required by law. The only way to avoid submission of prescription information to the PDMP is to forgo medical treatment or to leave the state. This is not a meaningful choice."
Yes, money in politics is a corrupting influence, yes, neither major party gets it right on some big issues (like the size of our military and how ready we are to use it, how much wall street gets away with ripping us off, etc), but are they the same?
No, of course not. Had McCain won in 2008, think we'd be looking at something like McCainCare now? As imperfect as Obamacare is, it's a vast improvement over the old status quo, and not an issue the republicans were going to tackle in our lifetimes.
If your state's signed on, great, you're done.
If your state hasn't yet signed on, call up your legislators, write to them, get your pals to do the same.
Make noise, make it clear this is an issue they should start caring about.
And aside from that, numbers build legitimacy. If a third party is obviously not going to win, but gets 10% of the vote, we start taking it seriously, and it can build on that success over multiple elections, just like individual candidates do.
The 'wasted vote' trope assumes that the sole point of a vote is to elect a candidate. Your vote is also an act of free speech - it can send a message to your fellow citizens and your government. Even in our stupid two-party system, politicians watch which way the wind is blowing.
An economic contraction and a tax cut then combined to eliminate the surplus, but it still shows that third-party votes can have power.
Also, Federal elections aren't the only kind: third party candidates win elections with some frequency at lower levels, because at those levels the person can matter more than the party.
How is voting for a Rep or Dem not a wasted vote, considering what they're doing to us?
3rd parties aren't fucking us (yet). Vote for whoever isn't fucking us, not because they might win (they won't), but to register the protest.
The family hired an older lady (immigrant, but lived many years in US) who came to clean their house a few times a week. She shared that she had been divorced from her husband but in the process ended up with the house. Being retired with no income (and probably no pension of any kind other than social security which is not enough), she decided to rent a spare room to someone.
Guess what. The dude renting it turned out to be a drug dealer (or was it just getting caught smoking weed?). When HE was arrested, somehow the law enforcement (not sure if local PD or DEA) made a connection to HER house. The house was seized. This older lady ended up having to stay with friends and going around working as cleaning/care-taker. Because her house was suddenly taken away from her, she had no other means of supporting her later years in life.
When I first heard it, I was like WHAT~~~? This was a few years ago.
And than I started reading about local PD seizing private property on minor charges.
I've been to Geogia, in the Caucasus-Mountains, not the southern US-State. There for example, it is common for Highway-Police to set up checkpoints, and if you are a foreigner, you can be sure to pay them some bucks, 25$, 50$, 100$ somewhere in that dimension. To be sure, this is 'illegal'... No one cares to stop the police from doing that though, but it is still illegal.
It is something entireley different, to always assume your car can be searched and all your cash can be stripped from you 'legally'....
In these seizures in US, EVERY single dollar is taken away.
Lived in the U.S. for 29 years and only been patted down or searched by police a handful of times while entering a Govt building or a Concert.
I agree issues need to be addressed but it's not a police state. The media likes to portray it differently.
As for places to visit, where to start! Grand Canyon, White Sands, Las Vegas, LA, Appalachian Trail, Space Coast, Yosemite, San Francisco, Oregon, Savannah, DC, Key West, Texas.... shit the list goes on... now that I think of it the scale of the country and being able to drive everywhere is simply breathtaking, I have traveled thru more of the US than most Americans I spoke to and to be honest yee guys have a great country populated by mostly friendly and nice people.
Yes I realize there must be exceptions, but I never got into any trouble travelling the breath and length of the US, and would recommend it to anyone, hell I be back in a few months for more :)
I've worked for foreign companies whose workers would come over for 6-12 months and would enjoy themselves here greatly. Plus, like any tech worker, I work with a lot of H1Bs and first generation immigrants who have very little negative to say about the US and are also quite happy with things. Anecdotal, I know, but so is what you're reading here and seeing in your media.
Anyways, I'm biased (obviously), and have probably written more than anyone cared to read, but I'd still recommend visiting someday. Avoid the urban centers (they don't differ much) and visit our national parks. Places like Yosemite [0] and the Grand Canyon [1] are breathtaking. For some of my former colleagues, just visiting places like Idaho or Utah, where they could be miles and miles away from the nearest person, was enjoyable, as that was something they could never experience back home (and those states are beautiful as well). And if you want to be really alone, visit Alaska.
[0] http://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm [1] http://www.nps.gov/grca/index.htm
If we don't fix that stuff, it will be China's world sooner, while they are still a one-party authoritarian state, rather than later, to give their middle class time to express their political discontents.
And on top all that, hitting the update button multiple times because it didn't apparently do anything and then finding you have three copies of your post is a leading cause of desperate people turning to needle drugs.
I wasn't talking about how great the nation is. I was discussing how it's a nice place to visit. It's like you read some other post, because I was simply saying the most interesting places to visit in the US may be the least populated.
Not in the mood to discuss various rankings and their issues. Completely unrelated to anything I wrote.
Have a good one.
No wonder 100 million tweets don't go viral featuring content like "I waked the dog again" or "Ouch, my nail broke".
Deleted comment
After all: '"We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty," an Albuquerque DEA agent told the Journal. "It’s that the money is presumed to be guilty."'
Would/do Federal rules governing asset forfeiture operations permit agents to use a search refusal as PC for a search of a person and their effects?
I understand that this discussion is largely an academic one. Realistically, if the officer really wanted to search and was otherwise barred from executing a search, he would make a "My knowledge and training told me that he acted like a terrorist." claim in order to provide PC for the search.
This is explicitly forbidden in the fourth amendment. Unless the money is evidence. (which it usually isn't.)
That judges allow this shows that the corruption is not just on the side of the police who are decking out their gin joints, but on the part of federal judges who are signing these warrants.
In my case (I had some assets held by a third party that were stolen in this way) the warrant had straight up lies in it used to justify the theft.... and worse, not only were they obvious lies, but in the weeks before the theft the very judge who signed it had been presented proof that they weren't lies in his court. (The third party was party of a lawsuit that the judge was hearing). So on one hand he knows the facts of the situation and on the other he signed an order based on a perjuruous warrant!
I... think you have an unfortunate typo here?
In the past in US gold was seized, now cash is being seized, seems to me like a trend to herd people into the system where banks and credit card companies can take a cut of everything + make things easier for IRS + make things easier for NSA as you be leaving a digital trail.
It is Orwellian beyond belief.
Just see Detroit as an example of our possible future.
I remember when this was passed (yes I was alive way back in the Reagan era). I was astounded because I had just learned the concept of due process. I knew then that this was going to be bad, in fact, I was outraged then.
This policy is the one that is a litmus test for me. You can't claim government is legitimate and in the best interest if the people when you have its agents engaging in (literal) highway robbery.
The argument at the time was that this was supposed to be for drugs. The whole basis of the drug war was that addiction is bad and thus to protect people, we need to get rid of drugs. OF course as the past century has shown this doesn't work (I'm including the prohibition era.)
But worse, it has twisted around and is now being used to cause suffering in people. Let me give you an example:
I went to the same high school as a guy who became an oncologist. Most of his patients were terminal. The DEA has decided that doctors giving terminally ill people drugs to relieve them of their pain is some sort of scourge on society... so they track how often they are prescribed... and then they average that and go after doctors who "over prescribe".
When they went after him-- he had a small practice-- they came in guns blazing, arrested everyone, stole all of his valuables, and his computers, stole the money from his bank and brokerage accounts. Stole the money his wife had. Stole the money his employees (most of whom were not wealthy.)
He was unable to afford a lawyer because they stole his money. Pre-trial they made many assertions and presented many documents he believe were dishonest or forgeries, but he could not prove it because they stole his computers and they were "accidentally damaged". They certainly weren't returning them.
They charged him and his wife, and told him that if they had to arrest his wife that she would be in jail as would he at lest a year before it came tot trial-- and so they'd place his kids with a permanent foster home.
But if he took their plea, he would get a reduced sentence (possibly it was probation, but It think it was 6 months in jail, plus probation) and they wouldn't charge his wife and employees.
Yes, they literally held his wife, kids and employees hostage (literally threatened if you want to be pedantic) unless he would admit to doing something illegal, even though he was just giving terminally ill people pain medication.
I think this whole affair is criminal, denying him adequate counsel by stealing his money, piling absurd charges on top of absurd charges to put others in jeopardy to manipulate him, it's all criminal.
He took the deal. His family was wiped out-- as part of the "deal" he gave up that money, and now the DEA is using it to buy toys for themselves... literally profiting from the crime. His family is in shambles because he can't practice medicine anymore.
Here's what's really absurd. The idea that terminally ill patients shouldn't be able to get take any drugs they want. Even if they risk overdose, it's a quality of life issue and effectively denying them is nothing short of torture. They shouldn't even need a doctors prescription. This is a fake crime created to exert control over the populace.
And you know what's worse?
Too many of the other people who went to this high school and knew him thought he deserved it... because obviously they wouldn't charge him if he weren't guilty.
How can I respect a government that practices this?
How can I respect Reagan who signed this into law? Or clinton who didn't try and repeal it? Or Bush who didn't either? Or Obama who not only did nothing, but had Joe Biden as his running mate?
How is this going to turn around? It's not until it starts getting painful. There are only a few ways to make things painful-- the ballot box is the preferred one but the two parties have that locked down with controlled nomination processes so no third party will have a chance.
Another is the bullet box and revolutions rarely turn out well... but they were the only method our founders could see to prevent exactly this situation. ("It's a republic... if you can keep it"... we've lost it.)
Finally is the soap box.
I'm getting off of mine now.
Vote 3rd party, it's essentially "none of the above."
Umm... $38 million in three months works out to about 5% of the DEA's operating budget. If your revenue is 5% of your burn rate, that's not exactly lucrative.
This is money that, absent some form of corruption, benefits exactly no one, not even greedy shareholders or executives with tons of stock options. Let's be careful with our use of "lucrative".
That's exactly my point. Not being a company, the notion of what is "lucrative" for the DEA is quite different.
Any business model that generates $38M/3 months ($152M/yr) could truthfully and emphatically be described as "lucrative." I don't think that's a fair argument.
No, a business model that generates and $38M of profits in 3 months would likely be described as "lucrative". A business model that generates $38M of revenue with a cost of revenue that is more than an order of magnitude larger is anything but "lucrative".
What does this even mean? Money gets spend by humans on things that humans want. How can you say it benefits exactly no one? Clearly it benefits the humans who stole it.
Sometimes it gets spent on things that humans don't want.
> How can you say it benefits exactly no one?
I meant no one at the DEA.
> Clearly it benefits the humans who stole it.
Umm... it isn't stolen, and no, it doesn't "clearly" benefit the people who executed the seizure. I doubt those guys see any upside other than perhaps keeping their jobs.
Asset forfeiture is theft. Taxation is theft. Imprisonment is kidnapping. War is killing. And so on.
They are not necessarily evil. It would not be evil for me to steal my neighbours' rifle if I knew he had nefarious plans. It is not evil to take money from a billionaire if he willingly allows the poor to starve otherwise.
But it is still theft.
Somehow people seem unwilling to use the basic, concrete, obvious terms and prefer intelligent-sounding euphemisms.
noun 1. the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another.
So to claim X is theft, you are claiming that it is wrongful; i.e. evil.
> Somehow people seem unwilling to use the basic, concrete, obvious terms and prefer intelligent-sounding euphemisms.
Somehow people seem to be willing to twist and distort basic, concrete, obvious terms to push and reinforce their ideology.
In a civil forfeiture, the government has the burden to show probable cause for the forfeiture, and in a contested proceeding has the burden to show that the assets are subject to forfeiture by a preponderance of the evidence.
The burden of proof does rest on the property owner for invoking the "innocent owner" defense, but that is narrower than it sounds. That defense is involved when, e.g. someone buys property with money that was given to them by someone who obtained it through illegal activity. The government still has to establish the money came from illegal activity, but the owner can assert that they did not know about and did not consent to the illegal activity.
> he may have been singled out for a search because he was the only black person on that part of the train.
"A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why."
Yeah, no. We've already crossed into unacceptable police behavior right there. There's no reason to suspect me of a crime, so you don't get to question me. At all. Forget whether or not it's smart for me to answer it, it's wrong for the cop to be asking it. We, as a society, need to walk this all back starting right here at this point in the process.
The forfeiture itself is so clearly unconstitutional that I can't imagine how even a loose constructionist can twist it to make it ok. Much less someone like Thomas or Scalia. Ugh.
What is it when the laws only apply to you but not the government? In this case the law is specific to people doing the violation "under color of law".
Individual discretion, but with collective protection and anonymity. That's not going to work.
And honestly, having cash in an envelope should be something completely normal no matter where you are. In Japan having tons of cash on you is not frown upon by anyone, because cash is used for everything and accepted everywhere even where cards aren't (and people are not afraid of being robbed).
> The agent found Rivers's cash, still in a bank envelope.
Yeah, the police have a severe race issue, but civil asset forfeiture is being used against anybody that has anything worth taking.
Of COURSE race is an important element of how law enforcement interacts with citizens. Race is part of these issues. The very term "race card" is offensive and marginalizing, even if you didn't mean it that way.
I am foreigner, so I can see it from different perspective than regular american person, who grew up with the notion "we, whites, are oppressing black men, and we should feel guilty". As soon as you guys realize that whites/blacks/asians/whatever word you come up with for arbitrary characteristic of a group of people, who live same life, live in the same country, has on a daily basis more or less similar issues, and, in case of assets forfeiture, all likely to get abused with it, may be then you understand that you need fight back, and not try to differentiate yourself from your neighbor.
Just a random overview from a guy without blurred picture of what is going on in your country.
There's one of your problems. Am I a person of no colour?
Your (and this isn't a direct attack on you) use of language contributes to the situation while it is trying to be softly softly.
Maybe it doesn't have as much play outside the U.S. but the term PoC seems to work well here. For the whole semantic argument I'll point to http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color .
I don't mention this to say civil forfeiture is necessarily racist, as much as to point out that it is a tool entirely too attractive to them. And they are using it as much as they can, here.
http://justicedenied.org/issue/issue_27/coleman_convicted.ht...
Fight one problem at a time.
Strongly disagreed. And for the reason that they don't occur in a vacuum. Racism and police abuse have a very long history.
"Held: When challenging the legality of a §853(e)(1) pre-trial asset seizure, a criminal defendant who has been indicted is not constitutionally entitled to contest a grand jury’s determination of probable cause to believe the defendant committed the crimes charged."
Kind of a weird 6-3 coalition too.
[1] http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-464_7mi8.pdf
It seems to me that any asset seizure should be at most tied to a fair trial. Once an asset seizure has taken place, the clocks starts ticking on "speedy trial" as if the defendant himself had been arrested. If the defendant isn't convicted within a reasonable time, the assets must be returned, with a burden on the government to show that the assets were the proceeds of a crime.
That it lost is a big part of the problem-- that Judges are not throwing these cases out of court every time they see a warrant to steal money-- is a problem.
The DEA agent they are quoting is either ignorant or means that there is no due process before they seize the money in the first place.
But you do get the due process after the fact.
Most of the time there is no trial because the person they took the money from doesn't go back to claim it. Why? Because it was illegal money.
There probably should be some quick safeguards put in place to make sure the cops aren't just stealing cash for no reason forcing a court hearing to get it back. But the whole process is a lot less thieving that WAPO depicts.
"Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars" -- http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken
There's no trial because they go after tiny amounts, generally with no evidence of guilt, knowing that it won't be worth the owner's time to fight back.
Read that article I linked if you haven't already, it's quite extensive and well-researched. And then tell me that this is something other than straight-up highway robbery.
Because the time and/or money cost of fighting the theft is more than the value of the money stolen? Court isn't cheap. Court is appallingly expensive.
NOTE: I am absolutely not making the claim that there has never been an instance of a right and just asset forfeiture case.
But it makes absolutely no sense to apply those methods to cash confiscated from individuals not charged with a crime. Having cash isn't a criminal offense, even while black - although as a practical rather than a moral matter, this young man would have been smarter to open an account with a large national bank or get a cashier's check to open an account in LA rather than carrying the cash around.
... but as this story illustrates, it's so shockingly immoral as to constitute robbery.
Shut it down.
I agree that forfeiture is a tool that is currently widely abused. Its use should be tightly constrained, if not entirely eliminated. However, I cannot agree that forfeiture has never been used to fight crime. Much like it's pretty clear that the NSA's dragnet has swept up evidence of at least one credible terror plot[0], it's pretty clear that at least one instance of forfeiture use was in the service of crime elimination or punishment.
[0] Before you downvote, understand my stance. The NSA dragnet is reprehensible and clearly dangerous to the integrity of the Republic. However, the dragnet is so wide that it can't help but catch some of what the NSA is looking for. See what I'm getting at?
Thugs.
I wonder if the DEA agent followed him on the train after having found out the bank had reported a bunch of "suspicious" cash withdrawals and given up the victim's identity.
With close to zero interest at this point
As such, it is also subject to being eliminated by legislatures. As the article mentions, New Mexico did this. That this has not happened at the federal level is in fact not an indication of a misbehaving executive branch. It is an indication that Congressman do not find the issue relevant to their reelection.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_...
> The practice has proven to be controversial.
Is that the new slang for 'criminal' or for 'state-sponsored theft'?
it's day light robbery.
It takes a while for Robin to show up, and it seems that in real life, this will never be the case - as $3.9 billion worth of seizures is going to motivate the cops and Feds to fight any changes to this legislation tooth and nail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
EDIT: In fact Bitcoin is much better protected against this. m-of-n signatures, brain wallets, hardware devices such as Tresor, etc.
This sort of things I have regularly been hearing about the US over the last decade make me really sad. Some 20 years ago America was a symbol of civil liberties for us. I considered one day maybe going there to work and live. A few years ago I still entertained an idea of going there for an internship. Today I'd be scared to go there even as a tourist or on a short business trip.
Let's say I go there. Then what? My cell phone and laptop can be confiscated at the airport for no reason. When I continue on to the streets I can be mugged by the police and get all of my money taken from me. And then when I go on without my phone or any money in my pocket, I can get killed in a mass shooting by yet another disgruntled worker who's just been laid off or by a high school freak whose girlfriend has just left him. Or maybe I don't get shot but then get sued by somebody for whatever reason and then I'm going to need from a few hundred thousands bucks to a few millions to defend myself in a court. Which will probably consider a Russian citizen a hacker and a criminal and pronounce me guilty anyway.
Sound like a true third world country to me. I'm not saying Russia is much better. But it's not the same America I've gotten to know from the movies of the 60s-80s.
What happened to you? How have you fallen so low?
It is the same America it always was. We just have more people airing our dirty laundry.
I'm not sure. America used to be a lot more diverse in how it was governed. Thought Chicago was too corrupt? Move to California.
More and more issues are becoming federal issues (drugs, bridge maintenance, even), so corruption and injustice becomes a universal problem.
>Now we steal their money.
Subtle comment but it's true. Most white, affluent citizens don't ever run into these types of police state problems. In a sense, we are no different than leap_ahead in that we are finally seeing what the poor black community has had to experience for generations.
It's scary for sure but the zeitgeist seems to be shifting. I have high hopes of the future but then again maybe I'm just overly optimistic.
Reagan raised taxes when he had to. His scions stoutly refuse in his name. Nixon created the EPA. It is definitely worse now. The right is more right; the left is more right.
What if some patent troll learns I'm going for a visit to the US? What if they secretly tell the police to arrest me at the airport and then sue me over some dumb patents?
What if somebody makes a joke on the Internet and then I'm detained at the airport and interrogated whether I have fought in the Ukraine?
What if they learn I have some Muslim friends and decide to question me if I knew of any bombing plans? What if they send me to one of their secret prisons to beat out my consent to spy on my friends?
You see my problem?
1. Patent trolls have no political clout. Zero chance of police arresting someone on their behalf (let alone them calling police to request this). Patents are a civil matter, not criminal.
2. I have not heard of the US interrogating any suspected Ukraine-invasion fighters.
3. Muslim friends could bring you more scrutiny. But they'd have to be pretty dirty to warrant that much attention on you. I haven't heard one case of someone being taken to a secret prison just to be convinced to turn spy. If you're taken to a supposed "secret prison", you're probably there to stay.
What about this?
http://www.thelocal.se/20120419/40368
>> If you're taken to a supposed "secret prison", you're probably there to stay.
Okay, thank you very much, I'm staying home then.
In reality, you would be much better off and safer visiting the US now than you would have been in the past - especially the 60s and 80s.
I wouldn't even consider going on vacation there anymore.
Do you realize that the news report thing out of proportion, right?
Conversely, do you realize this sort of things shouldn't be really happening in what claims to be the most advanced and civilized country on this planet? I'm not hearing of this crap happening in central Europe for instance. You can expect these things from some forgotten African country, but not really from one of the so called first-world countries.
Really, those government agents should have had access to sufficient information to determine if those 160000 dollars had a legitimate origin and a legitimate objective. Where's the due process please? For many people this sum could represent several years of savings. The government can't just take it for no reason.
Perhaps this poor black guy should consider emigration from the US. He could move to Europe. I'm sure if he was ready to launch a startup he should be able to land a good job there, then get rid of the US passport a few years later.
You seem to have fallen for American propaganda harder than any American I've ever met. We are taught in our schools about the evils our government has conducted throughout our history to the indigenous pre-Columbus populations, women, ethnic and sexual minorities. There has never been a period in American history where some evil was not being visited on either our own people by the rich and powerful or our Government, or evil visited on people of other countries.
I do think it's a country with a lot of positive qualities and the majority of Americans are decent people but with 300,000,000 people some of them are going to be evil or misguided in their attempts to transform the US and the world in ways they think should happen.
The "War on Drugs," which began with alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s and was shifted to other narcotics as time went by is one of those examples. Some Americans think that other Americans should be prevented from taking drugs for a variety of reasons, and so laws attempting to prohibit the trade and usage of narcotics are passed. Civil forfeiture was added as a "tool" to make trade in narcotics more painful as just locking up or fining people was not having the desired effect.
Rather than admit that some people will take drugs whether they are legal or not, these people who want no one to take drugs would rather push further and further in their misguided quest.
Another example would be to see how long someone could shout obscenities at Putin in front of the Kremlin without getting thrown in the back of a truck. In the US, we have the freedom of press to put out articles like this.
I'm sure the everyday life of a Russian isn't totally miserable, and the US has its major issues, but I can't think of a single civil-rights issue where Russia is a leader.
You are correct. US rates better on the freedom of press. The only problem, the articles like this, do they have any power to change things or is it just talk and talk and nothing gets changed?
>> I'm sure the everyday life of a Russian isn't totally miserable, and the US has its major issues, but I can't think of a single civil-rights issue where Russia is a leader.
We do have free medical service available to everyone and also free higher education. They're not as good as they once were (sometimes terrible) but they are available to everyone.
I'd call these basic human rights, access to medical help and access to education.
It never was. You just grew up and now you're able to see past the propaganda.
I ask because there are a few ways to avoid this particular situation; fix government overreach or stop carrying your life savings in cash. Doing both seems safest, but if we can only do one, then itis obvious which is easiest.
This is why people used to carry traveler's checks before plastic became ubiquitous - people know that carrying a bunch of cash as a tourist in an unfamiliar place is unwise.
This isn't about whether or not one should carry large amounts of cash with them.
Rather, this is about an abuse of power by a large government entity that doesn't seem to be held accountable for its actions.
I suppose we have the right to be suspicious if we want, but do not be surprised when someone mistakes you for a criminal.
"A bearer instrument is a document that indicates that the owner of the document has title to property, such as shares or bonds. Bearer instruments differ from normal registered instruments, in that no records are kept of who owns the underlying property, or of the transactions involving transfer of ownership. Whoever physically holds the bearer bond papers is assumed to be the owner of the property. This is useful for investors and corporate officers who wish to retain anonymity, but ownership is extremely difficult to recover in event of loss or theft." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bearer_instrument
Was he just going to go find someone and give them 16k for a music video company? 16k in cash just makes very little sense to me.
Its my money, I can do whatever I want.
Yes, I had the right to do otherwise, but without a logical reason to do so, why?
I am honestly wondering if there are any good reasons to carry cash like that. Ignorance, perhaps.
I'd never carry around such a wad of cash. But if I ever chose to, I should only have to fear losing it to criminals or absentmindedness, not the government.
... but did the Washington Post bother finding out if this man was involved in criminal activity? It does not make this law any less unfair, but surely it makes a difference in the outrage in this case.
People are not upset when cartel members have their planes and jewelry confiscated.
Proving your life savings are in fact legally earned should be pretty simple. Print out a bank statement (he said he withdrew it from an out of state bank) and take it to the nearest DEA (or US Marshal?) office.
On the other hand, if he could not furnish a bank statement, has a history of drug dealing or other criminal activity I would be no more outraged than when a local drug dealer has his car confiscated. (Although I would still be against the law in principle)
The Washington Post confirmed that he was never tried for any crime, let alone convicted. The legal system of the US is built on the premise that guilt must be shown, and innocence presumed. They didn't even attempt to show he was guilty -- instead, they just stole his money.
We should be just as outraged when the government violates the rights of a total scumbag as we are when they violate the rights of an upstanding citizen. To do anything less is to make a total lie of the idea that we have any rights at all.
Imagine if the government censored a movie and the response was, well, before we get all outraged at this blatant violation of freedom of speech, what if the movie was about really bad stuff? Well, there's no point in "freedom of speech" if it only protects the things everybody likes.
In a less philosophical and a more practical sense, if we look the other way when the law is stretched, it will quickly lead to discrimination, and eventually the law will go after the rest. Civil forfeiture has already become a source of profit for police department.