Links published on August 20, 2006
Court rules 2003 money seizure correct despite no drugs found
Consider the following story:
- A man and his friends pool their money to buy a truck, and the man flies across country to go pick it up.
- When the deal falls through, the man rents a car and drives back.
- When he gets pulled over, police confiscate the money — which was in a cooler — on the grounds that concealing a significant sum of cash is evidence of drug trafficking.
- On appeal, the US 8th Circuit Court agrees.
You might be surprised to know that this sort of thing happens all the time in the United States; “drug-related” asset seizures — often predicated on nothing more than a dog’s bark — represent a significant revenue stream for police departments.
But I’m a fair-minded person; let’s keep the asset forfeiture law, and introduce a corollary: a law-enforcement officer who seizes cash, property or other valuable assets should be — on successful conclusion of a civil suit demonstrating that insufficient evidence existed for the seizure — personally liable for up to, say, ten times the value of the assets seized. The officer’s immediate supervisor should be liable for up to five times the value, and any magistrate who signs off on a forfeiture with insufficient evidence should be liable for up to twice the value.
And, of course, the evidence standards of these cases would be quite different than the “well, Your Honor, after three hours of making my drug dog sit there, he got fidgety — so obviously there must have been some drugs in the car” which passes normally.
In other words, when we hand someone a lot of power, we should also hand them a huge risk if they exercise it inappropriately.
Holes
Things any developer of feed-reader software should be staying on top of.
Introducing Feed Crier
A cool idea, but the last thing I need is more things telling me that there’s stuff I haven’t read :(
George Felix Allen Sings
Virginia Senator George Allen’s cameo, as a Confederate officer, in Gods and Generals.
Trivia:
- He used to be one of my Senators.
- Robert C. Byrd, who also used to be one of my Senators (and who I vastly prefer) also had a cameo in Gods and Generals, as a Confederate general.
- I saw the movie in the theater with some friends. We spent almost the entire time explaining the historical inaccuracies to a mother and son who were sitting in the next row (the son, who I’m guessing was maybe 12 or 13 years old, was doing a report on the movie to get extra credit in a history class).
- We joked afterward about the fact that, apparently, everyone in the Confederate army was a world-class singer. Just like the way that everyone in medieval China was a master of multiple martial arts.
- The book is vastly better, both in terms of accuracy and in terms of being actually interesting.
- Jeff Daniels put on a lot of weight between Gettysburg (which, by the way, is probably the finest movie ever made about the Civil War) and Gods and Generals.
- I actually know most of the words to “The Bonnie Blue Flag”.
- I actually know what the Bonnie Blue Flag was, and why the “Confederate flag” you see proudly displayed all over the south is actually historically inaccurate (see Wikipedia on the flags of the Confederacy for the gory details).
- I know the words to more than just one verse of “Dixie”, too.
- Earlier this year, I moved from a place which has a monument in front of the old courthouse commemorating its Confederate veterans, and which places Confederate battle flags on their graves each Memorial Day, to a place which deliberately left Southern states out when it named streets after the states.