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thanks for underscoring my point.
http://forfeiturereform.com/2012/07/...ng-passengers/An Illinois appellate court rejected Ivy Jackson’s challenge to Chicago Municipal Code § 7-24-225, which provides that the owner of a vehicle found to contain controlled substances or cannabis is liable for an administrative penalty and permits the taking of their vehicle. Because Chicago Municipal Code still lacks an innocent owner defense, a vehicle owner can lose their car [...]
An Illinois appellate court rejected Ivy Jackson’s challenge to Chicago Municipal Code § 7-24-225, which provides that the owner of a vehicle found to contain controlled substances or cannabis is liable for an administrative penalty and permits the taking of their vehicle. Because Chicago Municipal Code still lacks an innocent owner defense, a vehicle owner can lose their car despite a lack of knowledge of the presence of controlled substances or cannabis and despite a lack of participation in the alleged controlled substances or cannabis presence.
thanks for underscoring my point.
my qualification nullified your point
of course you would think so
The Libertarian Con: Favorite 'Rebel' Ideology of the Ruling Class
But libertarianism isn’t some alien political philosophy that somehow transcends the traditional “left to right” spectrum. It’s a radical, hard-right economic doctrine promoted by wealthy people who always end up backing Republican candidates [7], no matter how often they talk about civil liberties, ending the wars and legalizing pot. Funny how that works. (By the way: "neither left nor right?" That's how Mussolini characterized fascism.)
It’s the “third way” for a society in which turning against capitalism or even taking your foot off the pedal is not an option. Thanks to our ty Cons ution [8] and the most violent labor history in the West, we never even got a labor party like the rest of the developed world. So what do we get? The libertarian line: “No, no: the problem isn’t that we’re too capitalist. It’s that we’re not capitalist enough!”
Ask them what their beef really is with the welfare state. First, they’ll talk about the deficit and say we just can’t afford en lement programs. Well, that’s obviously a joke [32], so move on. Then they’ll say that it gives the government tyrannical power. Okay. Let me know when the welfare-lovin’ Danes build a Guantanamo Bay in Greenland.
Here’s the real reason libertarians hate the idea. The welfare state is a check against servility toward the rich. A strong welfare state would give us the power to say you to our bosses—this is the power to say “I’m gonna work odd jobs for 20 hours a week while I work on my driftwood sculptures and play keyboards in my chillwave band
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-a...y-ruling-class
aping someone else doing the same thing only highlights the point again . . .
http://www.volokh.com/2012/08/22/tow...et-forfeiture/Town Plans to Raise Revenue By Combining Drug-Sniffing Dogs With Asset Forfeiture
Orin Kerr • August 22, 2012 11:33 pm
They say a dog is man’s best friend, and the town of Henry, Tennessee is hoping that dogs can help the town raise revenue in tough times:
At the Henry Mayor and Board of Alderman meeting on Tuesday, board members decided to allow police chief David Andrews to ins ute a K9 program for the Henry Police Department.
Andrews told board members that the city is missing out on possible revenues that a K9 would bring. He said when you make traffic stops and the driver refuses to allow a search, their hands are tied. If a drug dog alerts on a vehicle, its gives officers probable cause to search a vehicle for drugs or illegal proceeds from drugs. More drug arrests and drug, cash, and vehicle seizures lead to more revenues coming in for the police department and city.
Andrews said the military has a drug dog program and he could get a dog for the city at no upfront cost. The dogs are usually labs and are very gentle, and come trained as drug dogs. Andrews said four hours per week of training is required but the officers will work that into their regular hours. The dog would stay at the officers residence at night and any monies for food, water, and vet care would come from the drug fund.
Hat tip: FourthAmendment.com
For more on the same theme, see here."As far as county law enforcement, I'm more interested in making sure the community is safe than trying to use I-40 as a revenue stream," he said. "I don't (know if) that's what the Cons ution, our original Founding Fathers, meant for us to do when it came to law enforcement."
Kinda surprised this thing wasn't happening already.
Just more proof that the War on Drugs, like the War on Disease esp Cancer, War on Terrorists, is above all a $10Bs business.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2...ce-report-say/A state comptroller’s special investigation of West Tennessee’s 24th Judicial Drug Task Force turned up instances of theft by the agency’s administrative assistant and jail trustees smoking seized crack cocaine.
It also reveals that District Attorney General Hansel McCadams and Henry County Sheriff Monte Belew had a penchant for using a confiscated BMW Z-3 car for their personal use.
The examination of drug task force operations was conducted by the Comptroller’s Division of County Audit with aid from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.
Auditors said items from drug seizures were stolen or misused with a task force administrative assistant and her ex-husband admitting to taking drugs and other seized items, including utility trailers and a flat-screen television, from the task force.
The report from the Comptroller’s Division of County Audit said McCadams and other directors of the task force were lax in reviewing the agency’s operations. The task force itself didn’t have adequate record-keeping or inventory management practices.
Auditors said they found a group of jail trustees on a work detail had access to seized items without sufficient supervision. Because of that, the report says, some trustees gained access to drug case files, smoked crack cocaine and marijuana while at the Drug Task Force headquarters and stole cash, old coins and other equipment.
According to auditors, McCadams sometimes used a variety of confiscated equipment including a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, a golf cart, a go cart, a four-wheeler and a trailer for his personal use. He flew on Drug Task Force airplanes and a helicopter on non-official business, according to the report.
has been since the 1980s. (Byrne grants started happening in the early 80s, I think) it just took awhile for journalists to start paying attention.
Well, as long as they're only stealing from bad people I guess it's okay.
interested posters should google Tenaha, TX wrt to the italicized.
http://www.theagitator.com/2012/08/2...e-war-on-cash/BATF: The Next Front on the Federal Forfeiture War on Cash
Over at the Americans for Forfeiture Reform blog, AFR policy analyst Scott Meiner reports:
Attorney General Eric Holder has granted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) authority, for a one-year trial period, to seize and administratively forfeit property allegedly involved in controlled substance offenses pursuant to United States Code le 21 › Chapter 13 › Subchapter I › Part E › § 881.The rule takes effect February 23, 2013, and is final:
21 U.S.C. § 881 is, among other things, often invoked to seize and forfeit bulk currency, where no drugs are found, on theories that the currency was furnished, or intended to be furnished, in exchange for a controlled substance.
AG Holder’s rulemaking announcement declared that such changes are exempt from the general notice and comment requirements because the department determined that the change does not affect individual rights and obligations.
AG Holder also declared that this rule change lacks sufficient federalism implications to warrant the preparation of a federalism summary impact statement.
Notice and comment rulemaking is not required for this final rule. Under the APA, “rules of agency organization, procedure or practice,”5 U.S.C. 553(b)(A), that do not “affect[] individual rights and obligations,”Morton v. Ruiz, 415 U.S. 199, 232 (1974), are exempt from the general notice and comment requirements of section 553 of le 5 of the United States Code.
http://www.theagitator.com/2012/08/2...taar-skeleton/Over at the Americans for Forfeiture Reform website, policy analyst Scott Meiner reports on the federal civil asset forfeiture complaint in the matter of United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton. This is an unusual case as the government’s case nakedly asserts, with no supporting evidence, that Eric Prokopi, owner of this particular dinosaur skeleton illegally imported the skeleton from Mongolia (Prokopi has manifests indicating he imported the skeleton from Great Britain). Additionally, the US government’s legal argument is premised on the impossibility of anyone in Mongolia owning fossils as private property, a claim that stems from the Communist-era First Mongolian Cons ution, which prohibits the ownership of private property. Prokopi’s motion to dismiss notes:
"Justice destroyed or kept 11,355 guns last year, returning just 396 to innocent owners."
"just" maybe the other 11K guns (which makes a huge hole in 300M guns in USA) really were tied to crimes?
Of all the stuff civil forfeiture could grab, this guy dog-whistles loudly to the bubbas: "the n!gg@'s after all y'alls guns, just like the NRA has been saying all along."
due process and property rights receive the explicit emphasis in the OP; which is where it belongs.
agreed, but this is the extreme right-wing MoonieBatTimes, so rabble-rousingly singling out bubbas' sacred guns is not surprising.
via Radley Balko.
Last edited by Winehole23; 07-30-2014 at 07:35 PM.
I met a journalist named Janet Phelan in the Yucatan during a 2010 sales trip who felt she had to leave the US because of her coverage of this sort of scheme (specifically how local governments in SoCal were using mandatory and -- she convincingly alleged -- biased psychological reviews to snatch private property and boost municipal revenue) had led to escalating harassment from law enforcement.
She was definitely a bit of a kook and on the more left-wing paranoiac side of investigative journalism, but on this particular topic, I found her research compelling/thorough and her interpretation of the facts lucid. It's pretty ing creepy when medicine and law are bent into instruments for what amounts to private inurement. E.g. imagine conveniently being found unfit to possess your property by a state psych board because you had been treated for ADD or depression at some point in your life. The worst part? This sort of shake-down appears to happen routinely, but because it's couched in legal/clinical euphemism, it seems to slip under the radar.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/09/28/in...set-forfeitureInspector General's New Asset Forfeiture Report Reveals DOJ Is Now Just Robbing Americans
Mike Riggs|September 28, 2012 12:26 pm
The Office of Inspector General for the Justice Department released an audit yesterday reviewing the DEA's use of asset forfeiture, which is the policy that allows federal law enforcement agencies to confiscate the savings and property of Americans suspected of a crime. The report highlights no illegal or improper behavior on the DEA's part, but it does reveal a massive shift away from due process toward blatant thuggery.
According to a chart provided by the OIG, 86 percent of asset forfeitures that occurred between 2001 and 2011 were either administrative or civil, and only 14 percent were criminal. That means roughly 86 percent of the instances in which the government took cash, computers, cars, homes, life savings, investments, property or other assets, it did so without approval from a judge, a verdict from a jury, or any meaningful form of due process.
This is not just bad policy, it is theft. The OIG's chart is below:
Here's some clarification on the three types of asset forfeiture, courtesy of the Justice Department:
Administrative forfeiture is the process by which property may be forfeited to the United States without judicial involvement. Federal seizing agencies perform administrative forfeitures. Seizures must be based on probable cause. The authority for a seizing agency to start an administrative forfeiture action is found in 19 U.S.C. § 1607.
"Administrative forfeiture can be used to seize and forfeit the following:
• any amount of currency;
• personal property valued at $500,000 or less, including cars, guns, and boats;
• hauling conveyances of unlimited value.
"Real property cannot be forfeited administratively.
Criminal forfeiture is an action brought as part of the criminal prosecution of a defendant that includes the forfeiture of property used or derived from the crime. If the defendant is convicted, the judge or the jury may find that the property is forfeitable. Forfeiture is limited to the property interests of the defendant and only to property involved in the particular counts on which the defendant is convicted. Only the defendant’s interest can be forfeited in a criminal case because criminal forfeiture is part of the sentence in the criminal case.
Civil forfeiture is a proceeding brought against the property rather than against the person who committed the offense. Civil forfeiture does not require either criminal charges against the owner of the property or a criminal conviction.
An asset seizure that raises some troubling issues
Texas and the Bexar County District Attorney's Office, relying on an affidavit from a Drug Enforcement Agency agent, seized these in September from his accounts and from his San Antonio area home.
The affidavit alleges an illegal money service business, a failure to declare to Mexico the departure of the money and that by using two passports — Mexican and U.S. — Villarreal was attempting fraud.
But Villarreal says he was deemed su ious because he's Mexican and has money.
Villarreal notes it would be a pretty stupid money launderer who declares the money he is bringing across, as he has done. He physically transported all but $2.6 million, which he wired into an investment management account, seized before the account's maturation.
Nowhere in the affidavit, says attorney Rolando Rios, does agent Jennifer Sanchez show concrete connections between the seized assets and any criminal enterprise.
But the conundrum of our forfeiture laws for me is that there can be a seizure and no proven crime. And if he has evaded Mexican taxes, why is that a Texas issue? This affidavit reads like a litany of suppositions.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/new...es-3946681.php
Some Good Ol' Boys' Creative Municipal Financing
Texas county returning alleged shakedown cash
Authorities in a Texas county where a drug enforcement program was allegedly used to shake down black and Latino highway travelers are returning more than $100,000 taken during the traffic stops.
The stops in Tenaha, which often resulted in people being forced to hand over cash without any charges being filed, have led to multiple lawsuits and two federal criminal investigations.
District Attorney Kenneth Florence said Shelby County has dismissed all of its pending forfeiture cases, even those without a connection to Tenaha, in what he described as an effort to turn the page after an agreement was reached in August to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from the stops.
"I just don't think you could get anything done with any of those cases," said Florence, who was appointed by Gov. Rick Perry in August and is running for the post in next week's election. "They are all tainted, so to speak."
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/tex...#ixzz2B0BtOhvR
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