Federal court rules civil forfeiture unconstitutional

Cuddles

Cuddles

About damn time...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksi...ds-innocent-until-proven-guilty/#5d7a81034b1f

In a landmark decision, a federal court ruled that Albuquerque’s civil forfeiture program “violates procedural due process” because it forced hundreds of property owners to prove their own innocence. With his ruling spanning over 100 pages, Judge James Browning also found that the city’s “forfeiture officials have an unconstitutional institutional incentive to prosecute forfeiture cases,” since the program has “de facto power over its spending…the more revenue it raises, the more revenue it can spend.”
 
Why's this shit still happening?
https://www.yahoo.com/news/suspicious-dallas-detectives-seize-100k-000000484.html

‘Suspicious’: Dallas Detectives Seize $100k from Woman at Airport Without Charging Her With a Crime
Two Dallas detectives searched a 25-year-old Chicago woman’s suitcase at Dallas Love Field Airport on Dec. 2 and seized more than $100,000 from the bag.

Detectives say they smelled a drug odor before they searched the woman’s luggage without her permission but did not arrest her and haven’t charged her with a crime. The woman was flying domestically and had a layover at the Dallas airport.

Civil asset forfeiture allows police to seize, then keep or sell the property they allege was involved in a crime, leaving someone whose property was seized to go to court to try to get it back.
 
One woman’s six-year ordeal shows we must reform civil forfeiture laws

The Berkshire County Law Enforcement Task Force seized Harris’ 2011 Infiniti G37 on March 4, 2015, because her son, Trevice, was suspected of selling drugs. Although Harris had let Trevice borrow her car, the cops did not allege that he used it for drug dealing or that she knew about his illegal activity.

Harris did not get a receipt, and she heard nothing more about her purloined property until October 2020, when she received a civil forfeiture complaint that had been prepared in January. As Goldwater Institute senior attorney Stephen Silverman noted in a Feb. 25 motion, Massachusetts “does not provide any deadline [by] which the Commonwealth is required to initiate forfeiture proceedings.”

Like most states, Massachusetts lets police seize property when they have “probable cause” to believe it was used for drug trafficking. But once they have met that minimal threshold, the burden of proof shifts to the owner, who must show that the property is not subject to forfeiture — a rule that helps explain why Massachusetts was the only state to receive an F in the Institute for Justice’s 2020 report on civil forfeiture laws.
 

upload_2022-10-16_11-15-59.png
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top