51–60 of 455 posts
I keep seeing these stories and, yes, civil forfeiture is a problem, but why are these people traveling with CASH in these amounts? I always get a cashier's check or similar since it offers me some protection.
While civil forfeiture is scary, my (very very brief) stint doing criminal law as a public defender showed me that there's also a bigger side of this -- seizing the assets of individuals who are charged with a crime so that they cannot attain private counsel, make bail, or receive any creature comforts while incarcerated. What will generally happen is that after sitting in jail for 120+ days, they'll jump at any oppo…
The family hired an older lady (immigrant, but lived many years in US) who came to clean their house a few times a week. She shared that she had been divorced from her husband but in the process ended up with the house. Being retired with no income (and probably no pension of any kind other than social security which is not enough), she decided to rent a spare room to someone.
Guess what. The dude renting it turned out to be a drug dealer (or was it just getting caught smoking weed?). When HE was arrested, somehow the law enforcement (not sure if local PD or DEA) made a connection to HER house. The house was seized. This older lady ended up having to stay with friends and going around working as cleaning/care-taker. Because her house was suddenly taken away from her, she had no other means of supporting her later years in life.
When I first heard it, I was like WHAT~~~? This was a few years ago.
And than I started reading about local PD seizing private property on minor charges.
It is amazing that Americans allow this sort of thing then say they are a world leader in personal liberty.
When you have a country of 330 million people as large geographically as the US, it's very difficult as a citizen in one state, to be aware of what a national agency (the DEA) is doing across the entire nation, unless the national news outlets are writing about it.
While a typical American is going about their day to day life, living a local life (some town, in some county, in some state), the world's largest, most powerful federal / national government is aggressively attempting to undermine them in hundreds of ways large and small.
The US has a federal government that is financially the size of the entire economy of Germany, doing nothing but passing more laws, economic regulations, taxes, et al. to strangle liberty as much as they can and increase their power. There is very little else they do, or need to do. What does a beast that large do? Protect itself, entrench its own interests, grab more money, write more laws - there is nothing else for it to do most of the time.
Try doing something about that, or even thinking about how you can stop it, if you're an average citizen. It boggles the mind. Oh yeah, while you're at it, deal with the fact that the US military (which the NSA belongs to) is now increasingly taking aim at the US domestic population, you know, the world's most powerful military with a $600 billion budget.
Now compare this situation to the complexity faced by, say, Finland (5.4 million people) in trying to reign in or adjust its government system. The US has something like 200,000 pages of federal regulations; try fixing that, while the vast dedicated law passing machine is busy passing thousands of new regulations.
It isn't going to stop expanding and over-reaching until it crashes, choking itself to death.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am concerned that by calling it "civil forfeiture" this article is using language to mask a very basic crime. What was described in this article is called stealing or theft. To call it anything else is to mask and downplay what was done to this man. It is to enable the very act that was committed. George Carlin observed this as a dangerous trend in our language: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc Call it "…
Civil forfeiture isn't "soft language", it's a precise legal term. You may not agree with the principle (I certainly don't), but calling it theft is no different from a libertarian doing the same with taxation.
The important bit: > he may have been singled out for a search because he was the only black person on that part of the train.
The key part for me is right here - "A DEA agent boarded the train at the Albuquerque Amtrak station and began asking various passengers, including Rivers, where they were going and why." Yeah, no. We've already crossed into unacceptable police behavior right there. There's no reason to suspect me of a crime, so you don't get to question me. At all. Forget whether or not it's smart for me to answer it, it's wrong for…
For all the Americans on HN, just be clear that the DEA is acting in our name. They represent us, and we are responsible for their actions. This and worse occurs every day, and will continue to until we get our elected representatives to stop it.
I keep seeing these stories and, yes, civil forfeiture is a problem, but why are these people traveling with CASH in these amounts? I always get a cashier's check or similar since it offers me some protection.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not aware of any instances where it was used to fight crime. Seriously, not one.
shrug Several news orgs point to a DoJ study that finds that 20% of those hit by asset forfeiture end up charged with one or more crimes. I agree that forfeiture is a tool that is currently widely abused. Its use should be tightly constrained, if not entirely eliminated. However, I cannot agree that forfeiture has never been used to fight crime. Much like it's pretty clear that the NSA's dragnet has swept up evidence…
But I also am convinced that, would you present this on public television or anything with a similar broad distribution, you'd persuade many people to support civil forfeiture (or the NSA dragnet), because it's obviously effective against crime!
In the general public, only a minority seems to still be interested that means are somehow proportionate to the ends. THINK OF THE CHILDREN! INCARCERATE EVERYONE!
For all the Americans on HN, just be clear that the DEA is acting in our name. They represent us, and we are responsible for their actions. This and worse occurs every day, and will continue to until we get our elected representatives to stop it.
So do I vote for s Republicrat or a Republicrat? Or maybe s third party with no chance?