I am with you a thousand percent I have no idea how this was ever made legal in the first place or how it remains legal. To call the practice a joke is the understatement of the century.
I would like to see the Constitution of the United States amended to directly prohibit any form of this unless a warrant is served with evidence.
After that article a couple days ago of a company repossessing a guy’s literal legs themselves, I am wondering how much longer it will be before somebody has their artificial limbs confiscated simply for trying to fly on a plane.
People often say the Japanese take foreign concepts and improve them.
Americans take basic concepts and make them as horrible inefficient and unfair as possible. 100% Guaranteed.
What the DEA did might not be so bad as long as she gets every penny back for her trouble. It is malicious and unjust, but not stupid.
Walking around with 80 grand in your bag is the part which is not smart. The bright side is that it was the DEA that took it and not a thief! There is a path to recourse at least.
I have not, but I have deposited large checks before in the tens of thousands of dollars. They usually call in a manager just to oversee the transaction.
In this case, someone should have intervened to cut her a cashier’s check or suggest a wire transfer. That is the crazy part to me, that nobody as far as we know suggested a cash withdrawal maybe wasn’t wise.
I worked at a bank once upon a time. Sadly, we would not have offered an escort as we didn’t have any armed or otherwise qualified personnel available. For that matter, that would probably have required different training and insurance and we sure wouldn’t have sprung for that.
However, for a cash transaction of that amount we absolutely would have suggested (likely multiple times) a certified cashiers check, and due to the amount we likely would have waived our typical fee for that service. There’s zero reason to send anyone other than a courier with a locked, zipped official bag out of the building with that kind of cash, and we would have been concerned with liability had we done so.
That said, sometimes people can be weird AF about their money, and anyone who goes in thinking it’s OK to carry that much cash out probably qualifies for consideration in that category. Ultimately it’s their money and you can’t stop them…
According to the article, the money went from a container her mom & dad were saving the cash in to the daughter, who couldn’t make it to the bank before closing.
Dad did suggest a joint bank account.
I just noticed that Steve Lehto (an attorney in Michigan whose podcasts I listen to) recently did a video on CAF changes in NJ. In case anyone is interested here is the link:
Dismantle the DEA. Obviously the war on drugs has concluded. Drugs won. Any further fighting is like that ijn soldier on that island fighting wwii till the 1970s.
It was never about the drugs, it was always about giving government thugs an excuse to fuck with people, and the shit-eating dogs in the DEA are still doing just fine at that.
The original usage made sense - it was about captured pirate ships. As it was being used as an instrument of criminal activity by the owner(s), it didn’t matter who the specific owners were if they could prove it was indeed a pirate ship. (I could see the practice continuing to be appropriate in certain types of corporate crimes… but that’ll never happen.) It just got totally warped in modern usage into something grossly unconstitutional.
Yeah, I know they’ve been involved in class action suits, but I can’t imagine they get much involved in individual legal action (if they do, it’s a drop in the bucket, and one couldn’t count on help). And I’m not sure if the outcomes of those legal actions involved returning any stolen property or just preventing future theft.
But my point was that unfortunately asset forfeiture is so common these kinds of legal actions can’t deal with more than a drop in the bucket, so it’s not like one can have a realistic expectation of getting that kind of support.
Most CAF at least peripherally involves a crime, which makes it difficult to challenge in jurisdictions where it is legal, unless you have a clear path to SCOTUS for the challenge. In this case, it’s a perfect case to make a challenge on since there was no crime even remotely associated with the seizure AND it plays well to public opinion because the DEA seized a disabled old man’s life savings.
Depends what area of CAF you’re looking at. Most asset seizures, in general, are of weapons. Blatantly unconstitutional forfeiture, like highway stops where cash and valuables are seized rarely involve even the accusation of a crime. They’ve been so common that we don’t even have good numbers as to how often that (still) occurs, but we know it’s been happening in huge numbers (especially before the class actions and legal rulings).
A lot of people have lost substantial amount of money, or vehicles, in non-criminal cases without contesting the forfeiture because they were not just going to be on the hook for the legal fees, but, if they lost, the state’s legal fees as well. So the odds of getting pro-bono representation aren’t great, even for substantial losses.
Weirdly, almost no one thinks asset forfeiture is justified, yet that still hasn’t stopped them.
It would be damn hard for a 79 year old person with no experience in this kind of thing and with no idea that her own government might rob her just because it could. Aging in a period of time with so many changes in laws is frightening. When you have grown up believing if you do the right thing no harm will come to you.
Not necessarily applying here in the case of the man and daughter, but handing over large amounts of cash may be interpreted as attempts by the giver to avoid having to pay a ‘gift tax’.
The daughter is not 79. And I’m pretty sure my 87-year-old grandfather wouldn’t walk around with $80k in cash. Civil asset forfeiture has been on the rise for 30 years.
