Court rules 2003 money seizure correct despite no drugs found

A link published by James Bennett on August 20, 2006. Tagged with abuse and law-enforcement. No comments posted.

Consider the following story:

  1. A man and his friends pool their money to buy a truck, and the man flies across country to go pick it up.
  2. When the deal falls through, the man rents a car and drives back.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.

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