IJ Goes After Government's Forfeiture Scam -- When The Cops Become Robbers
The Institute for Justice has just launched a major federal lawsuit taking on the civil forfeiture machine -- the legal scam that allows law enforcement officials to seize your property, sell it, and pocket the proceeds...even if you've done nothing wrong. Even if you have never been convicted of a crime.

Mark Meranta from IJ wrote me in an email about Philly's forfeiture machine:

From 2002 to 2012, Philadelphia took in over $64 million in forfeiture funds--or almost $6 million per year. In 2011 alone, the city's prosecutors filed 6,560 forfeiture petitions to take cash, cars, homes and other property. The Philadelphia District Attorney's office used over $25 million of that $64 million to pay salaries, including the salaries of the very prosecutors who brought the forfeiture actions. This is almost twice as much as what all other Pennsylvania counties spent on salaries combined.

This is how the city's forfeiture machine works: Property owners who have their cash, cars or homes seized must go to Courtroom 478. But Courtroom 478 isn't a courtroom at all: there is no judge or jury, just a scheduler and the prosecutors who run the show. Owners who ask for a lawyer are frequently told their case isn't complicated and a lawyer isn't necessary, but are then given a stack of complicated legal documents to fill out under oath. Time and time again, property owners must return to Courtroom 478--up to ten or more times in some cases. If they miss a single appearance, they can lose their property forever.

More on this here. The video shows how rigged this is against the accused:

Here's one of IJ's cases in another state that highlights how sick this is:

Small businessman Zaher El-Ali, who goes by Ali, has lived in Houston for more than 30 years, and is in many ways a classic American immigrant success story. Ali struggled to get his Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck back from Harris County police and prosecutors for the better part of nine months. The pickup was seized by the police after they stopped the truck's driver for driving while intoxicated. But the driver did not own the Silverado. The driver was making payments to purchase the truck from Ali, but had not finished paying for it. Ali retained title, and would like to get his truck back. But under Texas law, the burden is on the property owner, and, as Ali found out, it is very difficult to get your property back once it has been seized for civil forfeiture.



That is why he brought a counterclaim in the case of State of Texas v. One 2004 Chevrolet Silverado to challenge Texas' civil forfeiture statute as a violation of his constitutional rights. For the benefit of all Texans, Ali challenged the profit incentive that underlies civil forfeiture in the state. He also challenged the provision of the law that places the burden on owners to prove their innocence, rather than on the state to prove their guilt. The goal of Ali's challenge was to help rebalance Texas law enforcement priorities, take the profit out of civil forfeiture, and protect innocent property owners caught up in an upside-down legal process that violates fundamental constitutional standards of due process.

The outcome, sadly, by Forrest Wilder in the Texas Observer: "When it Comes to Civil Forfeiture in Texas, You Have No Property Rights."

Only three of the Texas Supreme Court Justices dissented. Wilder writes:

Justice Don Willett, in a scathing dissent signed by two others, ripped his colleagues for punting. Willett bangs all the conservative gongs, quoting James Madison and Edmund Burke and opining that the case "evokes less Chevy than Kafka."

"Forfeiture 2014-style is not forfeiture 1957-style 21st-century practice merits 21st-century scrutiny," he wrote, noting that the vast expansion in the use of civil forfeiture occurred after the Legislature broadened the statute's scope in 1989 to include a grab-bag of felonies and misdemeanors, and allowed cops and courts to split the profits. "In the quarter-century since, we have yet to revisit the protections due in such proceedings.

"A generation ago in America, asset forfeiture was limited to wresting ill-gotten gains from violent criminals. Today, it has a distinctive 'Alice in Wonderland' flavor, victimizing innocent citizens who've done nothing wrong."

There's something beyond hypocrisy here. It's not just that we live in a political moment in which Texas Republicans speak of little else than liberty, property rights and government overreach. It's the sense that the state, particularly the criminal justice apparatus, as currently constituted, has become predatory, preying on the weak and forcing them to pay for it, too.

Is this the America you thought you were living in? The America you want to be living in?

UPDATE: WaPo's "Stop and Seize," an investigative report by Michael Sallah, Robert O'Harrow Jr., and Steven Rich:

Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of "highway interdiction" to departments across the country.

One of those firms created a private intelligence network known as Black Asphalt Electronic Networking & Notification System that enabled police nationwide to share detailed reports about American motorists -- criminals and the innocent alike -- including their Social Security numbers, addresses and identifying tattoos, as well as hunches about which drivers to stop.

Many of the reports have been funneled to federal agencies and fusion centers as part of the government's burgeoning law enforcement intelligence systems -- despite warnings from state and federal authorities that the information could violate privacy and constitutional protections.

A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing "trophy shots" of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities.

More from the piece:

A 40-year-old Hispanic carpenter from New Jersey was stopped on Interstate 95 in Virginia for having tinted windows. Police said he appeared nervous and consented to a search. They took $18,000 that he said was meant to buy a used car. He had to hire a lawyer to get back his money.

Mandrel Stuart, a 35-year-old African American owner of a small barbecue restaurant in Staunton, Va., was stunned when police took $17,550 from him during a stop in 2012 for a minor traffic infraction on Interstate 66 in Fairfax. He rejected a settlement with the government for half of his money and demanded a jury trial. He eventually got his money back but lost his business because he didn't have the cash to pay his overhead.

"I paid taxes on that money. I worked for that money," Stuart said. "Why should I give them my money?"