Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘forfeiture’

For Long Island prosecutors, a merry forfeiture feast

“Prosecutors in Suffolk County, New York gave themselves $3.25 million in bonuses — from the asset forfeiture fund, of course.” [David Schwartz, Newsday]

P.S. Wyoming highway cops seized $91,800 from motorist Phil Parhamovich, claiming he gave it to them voluntarily; shortly after the Institute for Justice launched a national publicity campaign on the musician’s behalf, a judge reversed the seizure and ordered the money returned [Jacob Sullum/Reason, AP/Chicago Tribune] And a curious defense of the practice from a high Justice Department official [Tim Cushing, TechDirt (“DOJ: Civil Asset Forfeiture Is A Good Thing That Only Harms All Those Criminals We Never Arrest”)]

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Law enforcement for profit roundup

  • In Mississippi, a “mother has been forbidden from any contact with her newborn for 14 of the 18 months the child has been alive” because of unpaid misdemeanor fines [Radley Balko, WLBT/MSNewsNow; judge has now resigned, but similar practices reported to be common] Is Biloxi going to do better? [ABA Journal]
  • “They … didn’t give it back”: outrageous tales of asset forfeiture from Alabama [Connor Sheets, AL.com]
  • Efforts afoot in Lansing to write down nearly $595 million in unpaid Michigan drivers’ fees [Chad Livengood, Crain’s Detroit Business] Warren, Mich., residents invited to turn in neighbors on suspicion, win bounties from forfeiture funds [Scott Shackford]
  • Ethical red flags: maker of heroin-cessation compound “marketing directly to drug court judges and other officials.” [Jake Harper, NPR]
  • In Craighead County, Arkansas, private probation firms sue judges who cut them out of the process [Andrew Cohen, The Marshall Project]
  • From Ohio “mayor’s courts” to asset forfeiture, prosecution for profit imperils due process [Jacob Sullum]

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Unanimous House backs IRS structuring seizure reform

A victory worth cheering for due process and property rights: the U.S. House has unanimously approved a bill that would curb IRS seizure of bank accounts premised on the owners’ having engaged in a pattern of deposits or withdrawals below the $10,000 reporting threshold (“structuring forfeiture”). The measure would 1) codify a recent IRS practice of not keeping money if no underlying illegality were found such as tax evasion or income from unlawful sources; 2) assure account holders a quick hearing after a seizure, a process that can now drag out for long periods. [Institute for Justice press release; Michael Cohn, Accounting Today] The Treasury inspector general found that “in a whopping 91 percent of sampled cases, the laws were being used to forfeit assets from individuals and businesses found to have obtained their income legally.” [Michael Haugen, The Hill, April]

I’ve been writing on this issue for years. The bill, co-sponsored by Reps. Peter Roskam (R-IL) and Joseph Crowley (D-NY), is called the Clyde-Hirsch-Sowers RESPECT Act; I’ve written about the structuring case of Maryland farmer Randy Sowers here and here.

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Crime and punishment roundup

  • “This Massachusetts Lawmaker Wants to Throw Folks in Prison for Having Secret Car Compartments” [Scott Shackford; earlier on compartment bans here, here, and here]
  • Traffic stops dangerous and intrusive. Why not focus them where they’re most needed? [Steve Chapman] More: a different view from Scott Greenfield;
  • Why is AG Sessions enabling forfeiture end runs by police around their own state lawmakers? It’s not good federalism [Natalie Delgadillo, Governing] Angling to end suit, Philadelphia offers to end use of asset forfeiture funds for law enforcement [Robert Moran, Philadelphia Inquirer]
  • White-collar prosecution: “Time To Revisit The Yates Memo?” [Robert Bork, Jr.]
  • What happened when Rhode Island inadvertently legalized indoor prostitution [Elana Gordon, NewsWorks]
  • What if U.S. Department of Justice policies had to be run through OIRA regulatory review for cost-benefit comparison, as many other agencies’ do? [Mark Osler, Marshall Project]

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Sessions to expand civil asset forfeiture

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has announced an expansion of the scope of civil asset forfeiture, under which government can seize and keep assets on suspicion without a criminal conviction or even the filing of a criminal charge. Reforms in the previous administration, which Sessions intends to roll back, limited some of the applications of the practice. [Chris Ingraham, Washington Post, Jonathan Blanks/Democracy Journal, C.J. Ciaramella/Reason, Steven Nelson/U.S. News, Dominic Holden and Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed] There had been warning something like this might be in the works.

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Crime and punishment roundup

  • Clark Neily, who spent 17 years at the Institute for Justice and is the author of the constitutional law book Terms of Engagement, joins Cato as vice president for criminal justice [Cato press release]
  • California is among 29 states that revoke drivers’ licenses for failure to pay tickets, which can knock poorer persons out of the workforce over minor offenses [Maura Ewing, The Atlantic]
  • It’s quite rare for prosecutors to file felony charges against public defenders — unless you’re in New Orleans [The Guardian] “Jefferson Parish prosecutors used fake subpoenas similar to those in New Orleans” [Charles Maldonado, The Lens]
  • To explain America’s love affair with incarceration, look first to ideology not race [Thaddeus Russell, Reason]
  • North Carolina law bans persons on sex offender registry from using social media. Constitutional? [Federalist Society podcast with Ilya Shapiro, Cato on Supreme Court case of Packingham v. North Carolina, more on sex offender registries]
  • Judge orders D.A. to return life savings seized from legal medical cannabis business owners; no charges had been brought [Institute for Justice press release] D.A. then files charges against him and his attorney [NBC San Diego]

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More tales of motorist-beware Tenaha, Texas

From John Ross’s April 28 Short Circuit (Institute for Justice):

Readers may recall Tenaha, Tex. officials’ particularly opprobrious abuse of asset forfeiture, which got a write-up in The New Yorker. This week, the Fifth Circuit shares additional details that were news to the editorial staff: During the investigation of the city’s forfeiture practices, the city marshal bugged other officials’ offices, including the mayor. He was also stealing drugs from the evidence room and selling them.

Is it a climate of forfeiture-derived local government finance that attracts this sort of official?

I wrote up Sarah Stillman’s New Yorker piece at the time. Overlawyered coverage of Tenaha here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Pennsylvania high court limits civil asset forfeiture

In an important decision the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that to seize property under civil process the state must prove that property played a significant role in crime, and the value seized cannot be disproportionate to the offense [AP/Allentown Morning Call, C.J. Ciaramella/Reason, opinion in car and real estate proceedings involving Elizabeth Young, background Milad Emam, Philadelphia Inquirer 2016 op-ed on Institute for Justice brief] Philadelphia authorities seized Young’s house and minivan after her son sold $90 worth of marijuana on her front porch. Earlier this year I covered a different Pennsylvania intermediate court decision, which also checked the scope of forfeiture law, here.

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Treasury: most structuring money grabs are of otherwise lawful funds

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has released a new report on federal seizures of funds for the offense of unlawful bank “structuring” — the purposeful keeping of deposits or withdrawals below $10,000, a threshold that triggers reporting by the bank. The report confirms that in the great majority of cases, the funds being deposited or spent were not themselves associated with unlawful activity such as narcotics, tax evasion, or fraud. “The IG took a random sample of 278 IRS forfeiture actions in cases where structuring was the primary basis for seizure. The report found that in 91 percent of those cases, the individuals and business had obtained their money legally.” The seizure of legal source funds appears to have dropped sharply since the announcement of new policies by the IRS in 2014 and the U.S. Department of Justice in 2015. [Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post] Earlier on structuring here.

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