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Posted on 05/21/2012 1:30:21 PM PDT by QT3.14
Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language. This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
What happened to the Constitution and Due Process?
And then people wonder why people like Eduardo Saverin (FaceBook founder) are denouncing their US citizenship. What the Gov’t can do to these people, they can certainly do to me.
Hah. Gov’t has been seizing the citizens resources for years.
Is this not exactly the type of thing the Founders had in mind when crafting the 2nd amendment?
The idea of "in rem forfeiture"-- seizing property which was used in a crime, regardless of the owner's guilt or innocence-- is (unfortunately) as old as the Constitution; the First Congress authorized forfeiture of any ship found to contain smuggled goods (even if the smuggling was done not by the owner, but by one of the crew or by someone who had chartered the vessel). (It's actually older; the U.S. took the idea from the English.)
The concept was later expanded to cover all sorts of other crimes; the particular law at issue here (forfeiture of a building in which drugs were sold) goes back to the Reagan War on Drugs.
When is “The Government” not a looter? Think of all the government “services” and “benefits” you currently receive, at every level of government, and then ask yourself how many you would willingly give up rather than have to continue paying for. I would bet 95% or better, so that’s why our contributions to the bureaucratic machine can never be voluntary.
Roads and military. That’s about it. And roads is iffy because I really don’t think the feds should have anything to do with roads.
Government usually IS the looter.
I just sent the Tewksbury Police Dept. a nice little missive. Join in here...
http://www.tewksbury.net/Pages/TewksburyMA_Police/index
Without a conviction, how can “civil asset forfeiture” be legal? Innocent until proven guilty, right?
Taking assets without a conviction is robbery, pure and simple. “Hey, isn’t that marijuana I smell?”
Not surprising. It is surprisingly easy to persecute the innocent these days.
Most of the cash in circulation is tainted by cocaine. If your cash in your wallet is investigated and found to be among the tainted money, guess what, you’re the latest victim in the “War on Drugs”.
****
The term “dirty money” is for real.
In the course of its average 20 months in circulation, U.S. currency gets whisked into ATMs, clutched, touched and traded perhaps thousands of times at coffee shops, convenience stores and newsstands. And every touch to every bill brings specks of dirt, food, germs or even drug residue.
Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
****
Money can be contaminated with cocaine during drug deals or if a user snorts with a bill. But not all bills are involved in drug use; they can get contaminated inside currency-counting machines at the bank.
“When the machine gets contaminated, it transfers the cocaine to the other bank notes,” Zuo said. These bills have fewer remnants of cocaine. Some of the dollars in his experiment had .006 micrograms, which is several thousands of times smaller than a single grain of sand.
Zuo, who spoke about his research at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society on Sunday, found that $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills were more likely to be positive for cocaine than $1 bills.
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