Originally published at: After lengthy legal battle. the DEA reluctantly returns innocent man's life savings | Boing Boing
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that law should only apply if someone is arrested and convicted of a felony. any other application is straight up government sanctioned piracy.
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Indeed.
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Agreed, except the arresting agency shouldn’t be able to keep a penny regardless. Maybe it could go to a federal victim’s fund or similar, but letting agencies keep it is so obviously crooked and set up to incentivize false arrests it should be utterly abolished.
Hmm, I wonder just what aspects of his person “fits the profile”? What could it possibly be?
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Civil asset forfeiture where people are not convicted of a crime is just the government acting like the mafia. It needs to go away as soon as possible. Steve Lehto and Ken White talk about this a lot as do many other people. I have started giving money to organizations that fight against CAF and when I retire from my law firm job this is an area where I intend to donate my time pro bono. It’s just evil.
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More about civil asset forfeiture:
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So the War on Drugs is working as intended. /s
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War on Drugs without the drugs.
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So these agencies are basically privateers, operating with a letter of marque, ie. under the cover of law. If civil forfeiture is indeed struck down, would they just turn to outright piracy?
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You don’t need the /s. The whole point of the war on drugs was to make those uppitty Ns suffer. So yeah it’s working as intended.
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And what about the penalty for the agent(s) involved? He also ought to be able to recover more than just the exact amount they swiped from him. If ordinary people owe the government money, they get charged interest and penalties, so how about the reverse?
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Good for you. It was pro bono representation by the Institute for Justice that got Mr. Warren his money back. Given that the CAF pirates prey on the weak and poor, pro bono lawyers are going to have to fight the good fight.
I am happy that Mr. Warrren got his money back. But another area of work here is to mobilize to get these laws fixed, per comments above.
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No doubt its that he was returning home with the money. That’s normal drug courier behavior, right? to fly home still with your cash and no drugs
Not seeing the difference between their current behaior and outright piracy
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Institute for Justice, which came to Warren’s aid to get his money back
And that’s the only reason he’s getting his money back. It took a large organization doing pro-bono work and making a public stink to get the DEA to do the right thing. Most people don’t have that on their side. The usual legal process wouldn’t have done it (and would have resulted in lawyer’s fees eating up any money returned even if it had). This is so grossly unconstitutional.
The nature of the law is that it’s about the property itself being the defendant - it made sense in its original application, which was the prosecution of a freaking pirate ship, where who the individual “owner” was didn’t matter, as it wasn’t relevant or even ascertainable. The thing being seized wasn’t just the results of a crime, but the instrument that allowed it to happen. But pretty much every application since then - and really the law itself - has been broken.
Well, it was never really about the drugs to begin with, so…
I mean, it really already is. There’s all sorts of stories about cops in various parts of the country that routinely pull over cars traveling through their jurisdiction so they can look for anything of value they can take - small amounts of cash, the jewelry people are wearing… it’s literally not any different from highway robbery (except that you can’t legally resist them).
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And the DEA’s actions fit the profile of a racially motivated theft.
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Land of the Free! Ha fucking ha.
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Agreed 100%. Enforcement as a revenue source is nothing but a perverse incentive. One of the (things I liked about living in NJ is that all traffic fines went to the state. As a result, it was really unusual to see cars get pulled over unless the driver did something spectacularly dumb. No bullshit quotas because it wasn’t a revenue center.
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Land of the free, but your cash stays with us. After all, he was never arrested or charged …
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Living in the land of the Free can be very expensive.
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Damage penalties to be paid to Kermit from the DEA should come out of the confiscating agents personal assets.
What seems right? I think a few million dollars would make Mr Kermit whole.
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