131–140 of 457 posts
Ditto punitive damages in court cases (where the defendent pays, say, $3M in restitution but say $500M in punitive damages because they could easily afford the $3M and need to suffer enough to change their ways). Why doesn't that money go into the government general fund?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The car is potentially proceeds of crime Then the state must prove that case rather than it being in implicit assumption.
In the UK the prosecution - 'Crown Prosecution Service' - present the mobile phone evidence and the accused is able to provide evidence for legitimate income. The court then decide whether to take the house and cars. Simple.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> noncitizens necessarily do not enjoy the privileges and immunities of citizens. Would you have more reading on this? It's something I've wondered about but never really come across a comprehensive answer to. What rights do noncitizens not have that citizens do?
Right to vote(though this can be stripped from felon citizens), right to peaceable assembly, right to bear arms. The Constitution distinguishes natural rights of all persons vs rights and privileges of "the people" being citizens and non-citizen legal residents.
AFAICT, the Federal courts have not generally adopted this view (though it is popular in some circles, particularly the US Department of Justice); ruling less specifically that the term “the people” instead “refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.” United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990).
> 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.”…
So resident aliens are not protected?
A 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…
> In the court case, a man had his car seized when caught selling a few hundred dollars of heroine. Interesting perspective there. Some people think that heroin dealers deserve to be fully hung, drawn and quartered, their head placed on a spike to be pecked at by the crows. Others might think that 'it was just a bit of dope, why should he have to forfeit anything for that?'. The car is potentially proceeds of crime i…
His hands also enabled the crime to be carried out, should they be chopped off?
> 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.”…
No, the rest of the court found the the excessive punishment protection of the eighth amendment was applied to the states through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment as an essential right and therefore a component of “liberty” as used in the due process clause. Thomas disagrees with this fairly conventional incorporation argument and the idea of the protection as a fundamental right, but feels instead that a…
Additionally, a lot of the constitution is actually phrased as limits on the government rather than rights as citizens.
Hmm I wonder how this will affect the other civil forfeiture practice of charging the item itself with the crime (eg: "United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency" [0]) where the owner of the property is never actually charged with a crime. Maybe this will stop that because without a conviction any fine could be considered excessive? The logic behind these cases has always baffled me. How do courts get around due proc…
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The USA is a common-law jurisdiction which means that convention and "how things were always done" have outsized significance when compared to civil-law jurisdictions like much of western Europe. Civil-law jurisdictions tend to rely more on statute, but they also have legislatures that can actually get things done, rather than cultivate this bogus adversarial relationship between the people and the government wherein…
I agree that the structure of American democracy allows for the dysfunctional equilibrium that the US Congress presently finds themselves in, and I agree that some of that structure is in contrast to other contemporary classically liberal democracies. But even a more functional and productive legislature does not have the same bandwidth to look at individual ambiguities, nor the mandate to do so, thats found in the f…
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The executive branch can also help here. Someone can run for district attorney, say "my office won't use civil forfeiture", and it's gone. What is scary is that that's not the platform people run on, or win elections by running on.
That's even more arbitrary, and won't solve the problem, as the next administration can reintroduce it. It's a temporary patch of the problem, and is technically also an abdication of the executive from their assigned role.