Free Republic

The national revulsion against abusive civil asset forfeiture has not kept police from trying to pocket as much as they can from people who are innocent of any wrongdoing. A recent case shows how police can pressure motorists into waiving their right to contest seizure of money during a highway traffic stop. Phil Parhamovich is a musician who lives in Wisconsin. For years, he’s been saving money for a music studio for his band – “The Dirt Brothers” – and had accumulated $91,800 by early 2017. He doesn’t much trust financial institutions and did not want to leave that large...

DENVER -- The Problem Solvers have uncovered a city law that's making Denver millions of dollars before defendants have even been convicted of a crime. The Denver statute is called a Public Nuisance Abatement Ordinance and it allows police to confiscate property, usually cars, for a crime you may later be found innocent of. It's exactly what happened to 57-year-old Semere Fremichael, a native of Eritrea. The immigrant from East African has been driving a taxi in Denver for the past 28-years. In April, he was arrested in an undercover prostitution sting. An undercover female cop tapped on Fremichael's taxi...

Concentrations of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere surged to a record high in 2016, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Last year's increase was 50% higher than the average of the past 10 years. Researchers say a combination of human activities and the El Niño weather phenomenon drove CO2 to a level not seen in 800,000 years. Scientists say this risks making global temperature targets largely unattainable. This year's greenhouse gas bulletin produced by the WMO, is based on measurements taken in 51 countries. Research stations dotted around the globe measure concentrations of warming gases including carbon dioxide, methane...

A tiny memory lapse cost a man his Ford F-250 pickup truck and it took more than two years and a strong legal team for him to get it back. The reason why the truck was seized, naturally, was civil asset forfeiture. Read more....

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are instructed to select property for forfeiture primarily based on its value, with the legal status of the property only a secondary concern, according to ICE forfeiture guidelines leaked to The Intercept. The 71-page “Asset Forfeiture Handbook” governs forfeiture practices for Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), a branch of ICE, The Intercept reported Friday. Civil forfeiture is the government practice of taking property from a private citizen. In civil forfeiture cases, the state prosecutes a person’s property, rather than the owner themselves, and assumes the property’s guilt because property has no due process rights. While...

When Philadelphia police use civil asset forfeiture to seize millions in cash, cars, and homes every year, the money is put into secretive municipal bank accounts. Long-hidden documents reveal what happened to at least some of the money. It went for submachine guns, outboard motors and "tens of thousands in mysterious cash withdrawals over the past five years." Some $5 million is unnaccounted for, this investigation reckons. From Philadelphia Weekly: Attorneys at the Virginia-based nonprofit depict civil asset forfeiture as one of the greatest threats to property rights in the nation today. Under the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions...

Next week, the House of Representatives will consider an appropriations bill,.... Some members, Republican and Democratic alike, have submitted amendment to the bill that would defund the directive issued by Attorney General Jeff Sessions to ramp up the use of civil asset forfeiture. Sessions is a vocal advocate of civil asset forfeiture, the process by which local law enforcement can permanently seize property or money that is suspected to have a connection to a crime. During an April 2015 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, then-Sen. Sessions was less than sympathetic toward a witness, Russ Caswell, whose hotel was wrongly seized when...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions today announced a new Department of Justice policy regarding the federal adoption of assets seized by state or local law enforcement under state law. The Department’s new policy strengthens the civil asset forfeiture program to better protect victims of crime and innocent property owners, while streamlining the process to more easily dismantle criminal and terrorist organizations. The policy and guidelines were formulated after extensive consultation with the Task Force on Crime Reduction and Public Safety, as well as line Assistant United States Attorneys, career officials in the Criminal Division’s Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Section (MLARS),...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday ordered the expansion of the government’s ability to seize suspects' property – a move that puts him at odds with members of his own party who have slammed the practice for years as ripe for abuse and a violation of civil rights.

Civil forfeiture remains a controversial issue in America since it's "a process by which the government can take and sell your property without ever convicting, or even charging, you with a crime." The procedures are civil, which means defendants do not receive the same protections given to criminal defendants.Connecticut has put an end to this procedure when the legislature passed a law that bans civil forfeiture without a criminal conviction.Video - "Policing for Profit Visualized: How Big Is Civil Forfeiture?"The Law Democrat Governor Dannel Malloy signed HB 7146 into law on Monday after it "passed both the House and Senate...

Asset forfeiture "has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses."In March the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear a case filed by a Texas woman fighting for the return of over $200,000 in cash that the police seized from her family. Although neither Lisa Olivia Leonard nor any of her relatives were ever charged with any underlying crime connected to the cash, the state's sweeping asset forfeiture laws allowed the authorities to take the money. The Supreme Court offered no explanation when it refused to hear Leonard v. Texas. But one member of the Court did speak up in protest. In...

Like a bad skin disease that spreads rapidly once it takes hold, civil asset forfeiture grew rapidly for several decades, in the 80s and 90s especially. Once law enforcement agencies figured out how to turn it into an easy means of padding their budgets without much public scrutiny, they ran with it. Forfeiture laws originally meant to allow the confiscation of the great wealth amassed by drug overlords, were increasingly applied to seize small amounts of property owned by people who were merely suspected of having some connection with illegal activity. Many thousands of innocent Americans have had cash, cars,...

A new bill seeks to track your money and assets incessantly, will enjoin any business with government ties to act as a de facto arm of DHS, and would steal all of your assets — including Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies — should you fail to report funds when traveling with over $10,000. Under the guise of combating money laundering, Senate Bill 1241, “Combating Money Laundering, Terrorist Financing, and Counterfeiting Act of 2017,” ramps up regulation of digital currency and other autocratic financial controls in an attempt to ensure none of your assets can escape one of the State’s most nefarious, despised...

Justice Clarence Thomas questions the constitutionality of taking property from motorists with civil procedures. The idea that the government can take away someone's car or cash without due process offends at least one member of the US Supreme Court. In a statement Monday, Justice Clarence Thomas called on his colleagues to revisit civil asset forfeiture, the process that allows prosecutors to go after assets allegedly linked in some way to a crime. The justice argued the system has been widely abused. "Civil proceedings often lack certain procedural protections that accompany criminal proceedings, such as the right to a jury trial...

Sen. Rand Paul has long taken the lead in calling for the reform of civil asset forfeiture laws, a controversial police practice in which authorities basically steal the property of citizens without due process and little recourse. Billions have been seized from citizens by the police based on nothing more than suspicion, which many see as a direct violation of the Fifth Amendment. It’s state-sanctioned theft. “Under civil forfeiture laws, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent,” says the Institute for Justice’s Scott Bullock. On Thursday, Sen. Paul reintroduced FAIR (Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration) Act, which specifically addresses...

In a meeting between the new president and law enforcement officials, a Texas sheriff complained about legislation that would require a person be convicted of a crime before the state took ownership of his or her property. President Donald Trump, wrongly, disparaged legislators who support this reform to the forfeiture system. Politico notes the exchange: “On asset forfeiture, we’ve got a state senator in Texas that was talking about introducing legislation to require conviction before we could receive that forfeiture money,” [Sheriff Harold] Eavenson said. “Can you believe that?” Trump interjected. “And I told him that the cartel would build...

So, you’re sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of confiscated property. You want to give your workers a raise, but federal rules bar you from using seized assets to fund salaries. What’s an attorney general to do? Well, if you’re Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, you turn to a strange source for the solution: the very U.S. Justice Department officials who are responsible for enforcing the rules you want to skirt. They told Herring he could use the funds to cover routine costs “so long as your overall budget does not decrease.” Herring promptly started using seized funds to cover...

In a White House meeting with county sheriffs from around the nation on February 7, President Trump sided with the law enforcement community in opposing change in the nation’s civil asset forfeiture laws. Here is the transcript of that meeting, and the president’s flippant attitude (he joked about destroying the career of a state senator in Texas who had proposed a bill to reform civil asset forfeiture) and eagerness to stay in the good graces of the sheriffs are very bad news. Shortly after the election, I wrote that Trump should become a proponent of civil asset forfeiture and defang...

At a recent meeting with law enforcement, Donald Trump suggested ruining the career of an unnamed Texas legislator who had allegedly proposed eliminating civil asset forfeiture. In case you don’t know much about it, John Oliver has a great explanation: it’s a civil procedure that police can use to seize property from people when they believe the property was involved in a crime But, it is notoriously hard to challenge, has been used in questionable ways against poorer people and people of color, and funds resulting from the sale of seized property are typically given to the seizing law enforcement...

By a very large measure, Americans oppose civil asset forfeiture. They think that it is wrong for the government to take property from someone who has not been convicted of any crime. The most recent evidence showing that is found in a recent Cato Institute survey on public attitudes toward the police and in it, 84 percent said they oppose allowing the police to seize a person’s property on mere suspicion that he may have been involved in crime. Unfortunately, it seems that Donald Trump’s choice for Attorney General, Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, is among that small minority of...