Posted on 05/26/2012 4:50:30 AM PDT by marktwain
TEWKSBURY, Mass. – 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 – in order 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.
The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing” of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery.
Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate – the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate – these 30 episodes involved less than five one-hundredths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days.
The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence – to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible
(Excerpt) Read more at missoulian.com ...
This country has become a police state.
It is not BECOMING a police state, it IS a police state -- where units of government at every level: federal, state, local, school boards -- anyone with a little power wields that power in the most dictatorial manner, just because they can.
One day he led the charge and got shot ~ put him right out of the detective business fur shur.
The location had been raided numerous times before ~ which meant SOMEBODY ~ e.g. the landlord ~ had an idea who he was doing business with.
The police union sued the landlord under a variety of laws. They eventually won (well over a decade later).
The DC government and DOJ didn't lift a finger.
What I gather from this article is that DOJ has finally figured out that the landlords do know ~
“Forfeiture law is legal theft”
Agreed. Here in NC, they seize tool chests, depriving their former owners of an honest means of making a living, and toddler tricycles. I am sick of the WOD. I am sick of sacrificing my freedom in the name of saving a few morons from themselves. I say put the drugs in free street-corner dispersers and send trucks out twice a day to fill them up and retrieve the ODs. No more crimes to get drug money. No more beheadings in Mexico.
Well, my goodness, by all means let’s apply this standard to public housing, then.
How many drug deals have occurred in your average project?
Seems to me there’s some issue with equal protection under the law going on, here.
Governments from the federal level on down to the tiniest municipality have become ravening black holes as far as money is concerned due to their own profligacy.
Do you really want to allow them an incentive to just seize private property under whatever pretext they can dream up to disguise their profit motive?
You really do live in a Postal Service DC bubble if so.
and it will be applied in the war on raw milk...
for those that think us small l libertarians are only interested in “getting high” because of our stance on the war on drugs...
here is your result.....
taking of liberties is the taking of liberties, regardless of the pretty package it is presented in..
Sure, and for the sake of such a “haven” they’d go to all the bother of renting several orders of magnitudes more rooms than ever were involved with drug deals? And deals that weren’t so much like huge million dollar heroin stashes, but rather like penny ante marijuana affairs?
I think you lost your head in a mailbox somewhere along the line.
Oh. Then you support asset seizure by the government? Care to justify your position?
On these grounds a lot of housing projects should be up for grabs, or the national parks for that matter.
Obscene.
Maybe the UN should get them — sometimes I wonder if the UN could do far worse than our hobble-happy Feds.
my family had a private beach seized by the government that had been in the family as payment for helping to finance the Revolutionary War. Ted Kennedy promised to return it and never did.
Agreed, the war on drugs was never declared as a war in congress and thus is unconstitutional by definition.
The drug “war” is nothing more than a federal police action against civilians, most of them guilty of drug use, some guilty of drug dealing, and a number of people who are completely innocent...
The drug war is also the reason you can take over a certain amount of cash out of the bank without being a criminal by their definition.
Next thing they will be taking farmer’s land where the drug people go in and plant pot between the corn rows....
Even though they plant pot on the federal parks....
I hate the war on drugs, not because I like drugs, but because I hate the oppresive power it gives government.
Think of all of the shopping malls that could be siezed. Makes your head spin. Think of all of the parking lots that have been used in franches and national chains. There are billiona available. Let the good times roll.
What civil rights
Go to the link, and read the only comment!
Credit where credit is due: it was Ronald Reagan’s War on Crime/War on Drugs that opened the door to all of this statist exploitation. The ACLU, collectivist as they are, tried to warn us but we conservatives wouldn’t listen. I guess we assumed that police departments would always be run by fine, upstanding white males with a sense of honor...
Did you mean "can't" take over a certain amount?
FMCDH(BITS)
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