Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/07/20/letters-of-marque.html
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It seems like asset forfeiture should be slam-dunk-unconstitutional. How come there hasn’t been a successful challenge in the courts?
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Trump on Sessions:
Sounds like another round of firings is getting warmed up. We may not have Jeffy to kick around no mo.
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Anyone else read about Sessions meeting with hate groups in private meetings where he said It wasn’t “the government’s job to immanentize the eschaton” ? The dude is creepy. Trump firing him would be the best move this administration will have made so far.
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When i have to read the article title 3 or 4 times to fully understand it, i know it’ll be one of Cory’s. Which is interesting considering he’s a novelist.
Then again perhaps it’s just me 
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Republicans can be ‘troubled’ by this policy as much as they want, but they will never do anything against it.
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Budgets are tight. (or they will be if they can actually pass one) Jefferson Beauregard really needs that 20% cut for laundering funds for local agencies. /vicious sarcasm.
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I don’t think asset forfeiture would be unconstitutional on it’s face and it exists in plenty of other western democracies. Individual instances of it are clearly unjust, but they choose vulnerable targets who are unlikely to be able to fight back.
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Are you disappointed?
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Asset forfeiture after being found guilty isn’t unconstitutional, but this is strictly being done on the initial arrest. Sometimes it’s done even when there is no arrest. That’s about as unconstitutional a form of search & seizure as you could define. But you’re entirely correct about why it hasn’t gone to court to be declared so - I don’t know why the ACLU and other civil rights orgs haven’t beaten the crap out of this yet.
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I understood it right off the bat, won’t say if its just you or Cory’s writing style but it read fairly natural to me. Honestly i hardly pay attention to who the authors are for most posts. Anyway I am really hoping someone sues the feds and puts a stop to this forfeiture BS once and for all
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Obligatory image:
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Not feeling a whole lot a of sympathy for these douche bags.
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The Fourth Amendment seems like it should obliterate this:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
I mean, geez. I guess we all have our favorite Amendments. For Democrats it’s the 1st and for Republicans it’s the 2nd. There are a bunch of other good ones, though.
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I’ve always heard that possession is 9/10ths of the law.
Now we know the other tenth.
And it’s another tithe to our betters, shocking.
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The law around it feels very strange. In civil asset forfeiture the legal claim is against the objects themselves, not against the person, so whether or not the person has committed a crime is irrelevant. Cases of asset forfeiture have made their way to the Supreme Court in the US and they have been upheld (not to say they would necessarily be in the future).
But think of land expropriation which has been tested by courts over and over again. Governments can seize things in some circumstances. It’s a question of the circumstances.
[Emphasis mine] That’s an awfully tricky word there. Many of the cases we’ve all heard about are obviously unreasonable by any standard and are therefore unconstitutional. But the law itself isn’t because it is meant to allow for seizures that are not unreasonable. Like I say, expropriation is a thing, the government does seize people’s houses, and those people do lose in the courts.
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To me it looks like the word unreasonable only applies to searches, and so we are protected against unreasonable searches, as well as seizures of any type. Otherwise our personal property is ours only at the whim of law enforcement.
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welcome to otherwise, we’re all redshirts here.
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Well, again, the government seizes land that belongs to people, including their houses (a specifically enumerated item in the fourth) across the country and the courts uphold it. My understanding is that court battles over expropriation basically always go the government’s way [No citation on this since I think I saw it in a documentary (I believe it was a recent piece on people having their land seized to build border walls/fences)].
That doesn’t mean the police can legally take whatever they want. The word “unreasonable” means something. For some of us who are very literally and logically minded, it can be disconcerting to understand how much of the law relies on interpreting what is “reasonable”, but it’s how the law works.
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