U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
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Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#2A swipe against excessive civil forfeitures succeeds. These aggressive actions require citizens to forfeit property far in excess of any harm committed. In the court case, a man had his car seized when caught selling a few hundred dollars of heroine.
We have laws to punish illegal behavior, but it’s not right that all your property get snatched up too. The most egregious of these cases often involve no due process at all. People who are stopped and found to have large amounts of cash simply have it seized, even if they are never charged with a crime.
Recourse is often slow and expensive. It’s unlikely that this ruling will immediately change the rampant unconstitutional practices many police departments and towns rely on. But it is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, they will be taken to task in time.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#3What is scary is that something like the Patriot Act can be signed in overnight and something like this will take decades.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#4A swipe against excessive civil forfeitures succeeds. These aggressive actions require citizens to forfeit property far in excess of any harm committed. In the court case, a man had his car seized when caught selling a few hundred dollars of heroine. We have laws to punish illegal behavior, but it’s not right that all your property get snatched up too. The most egregious of these cases often involve no due process at…
It gets even more interesting when they are federal but not state crimes. In this case, officers from a relatively far away jurisdiction were seizing cash and cannabis from people following all state and local rules. Just one of the individuals was awarded 1.2 million last week. If this ruling applies to all previous cases police departments are going to go broke paying this back.
laws.https://www.kqed.org/news/11706921/lawsuit-rohnert-park-hopl...
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#5It will be interesting to see exactly how this ruling is applied in the field. My guess is that not much will change, as the most problematic and widespread applications of civil forfeiture don’t involve a crime where a monetary fine would be allowed as a penalty. Rather, the police simply steal (they prefer the term “seize,” but it’s just stealing) the money/assets claiming that they suspect it to be the fruit of a crime, then hope the person they stole it from does not have the resources necessary to hire an attorney to recover it. Charges are not filed, and in the majority of cases, the victims never get the money back.
IANAL, but at first glance it seems that such cases would be unaffected by this ruling. No fine is being imposed that could be considered excessive under this ruling - the person is simply failing to claim their property.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#6>Justice Thomas agreed with the result in the case, Timbs v. Indiana, No. 17-1091, but said he would have gotten to the same place by a different route. While the majority relied on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, Justice Thomas said he would have ruled “the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the ‘privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States’ protected by the 14th Amendment.”
I was going to comment that the real biggest legal problem with civil forfeiture is how it circumvents due process, but it sounds like that was the actual ruling given by the supreme court. I think the title of the article disagrees with the last paragraph. It was actually Justice Thomas who wanted to rule that it constituted excessive punishment, while the rest of the court ruled that it constituted a breach of due process.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#7https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-1091_5536.pdf
Here is the ruling in full if anyone is interested.
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#8Please don't editorialize the title. It should be "Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property"
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#9Non-paywalled press release from the Institute for Justice, who worked on this case as part of their mission to fight civil forfeiture: https://ij.org/press-release/u-s-supreme-court-rules-unanimo...
Re: U.S. Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property
#10Please don't editorialize the title. It should be "Supreme Court Puts Limits on Police Power to Seize Private Property"
I think the NYT updated the title. Unfortunately, http://newsdiffs.org/ seems to be broken right now.