Or as the police always seem so fond of saying, “ignorance of the law is no excuse”.
Double standers anyone?
If you withhold money from the government the IRS charges a daily compounding interest rate equal to the short-term federal funds rate plus 3%, calculated on a quarterly basis. In addition to the interest charged, the IRS will also assess a failure-to-pay penalty of anywhere from 0.05-1% on the unpaid balance each month. The total penalties and interest can easily add up to 9-12% per year.
In my mind Mr. Tan Nguyen should also be compensated with a similar interest rate on the 6 months he was deprived of his funds. Preferably the offending officer should be required to pay this or it should be paid by the department and deducted from his salary.
I had almost the same thing happen to me last time I was in the US, although I was just fined double for having out of state plates, not mugged as in this case (I was just over the limit on a clear stretch of road early in the morning). It was right outside of a town called Shelbyville too, which seemed kind of fitting at the time.
I’ve been asked that question at least twice that I recall, and I usually gave a “I’m not sure, but it was something like X” where X=1~4mph over the limit on that stretch of road. In the past I’ve had officers begin to lecture me about speeding and I’ve told them that they could save a lot of time and hot air and just give me the ticket. Surprisingly I haven’t been thrashed by Johnny Law. Yet.
Yeah maybe. But it’s not a question of the officer protecting anyone or liberal trial lawyers letting some guy walk on a technicality. The sheriff’s office just literally took several thousand dollars off some guy without any justification and then later claimed that they didn’t know that wasn’t OK.
There are no deep intricacies of the law involved here. I live in the UK, and even I know the 4th amendment of the US constitution prohibits seizure of personal property without judicial process. Absent that judicial process, what happened was actually armed highway robbery. It’s much harder to spin your way out of a very straightforward fuck-up like that.
“Drugs” is one of the backdoor passwords to the Constitution, unfortunately, so we have ‘Civil Forfeiture’. Even when the law(sometimes an exciting patchwork of federal and state, with local police forces sometimes nominally attached to a jurisdiction other than the one you would expect, because it offers more convenient seize-and-keep-for-yourself powers) is actually followed, it is largely an absurd caricature of due process; and it’s not exactly a secret that certain people get, and certain places offer, a…less than ideal… implementation of even what shoddy law exists.
In this case, the sheriff made the mistake of not even going through the motions of legality (and the bigger mistake of choosing a target who was able to get legal representation, with ‘criminal’ forfeiture, the defendant gets a lawyer, even if not necessarily a good one. ‘Civil’, though, purely on their own on that one.); but just stopping people and seizing property that kinda looks like it came from selling drugs or something is disturbingly close to being entirely legal, if you are just slightly less sloppy than this guy was.
