151–160 of 455 posts
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> It's more like someone stealing $200 Sounds like we're in agreement then. :) > and giving you a bicycle you didn't ask for s/bicycle/war. No worries, I make that typo all the time. ;)
I can't even imagine what 6 trillion dollars worth of bicycles looks like.
And bring healthcare up to French standards.
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The US still ranks among the best nations on earth when it comes to low corruption in fact. The civil forfeitures problem is non-trivial, but you're drastically exaggerating. The whole of the US has a very highly functional, low-corruption judiciary system, and a mostly still intact and strong property rights system. Most of America is low crime, low corruption, the opposite of what you're implying. In fact it's beca…
> The US is less corrupt than France for example Careful there. The Transparency International page you link to is the perception index. It measures what a set of people perceives corruption to be like in each country, and composits results from a number of different surveys in a way that as far as I know is not benchmarked against other data to verify if survey results actually matches reality. You can not use it as…
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…
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 "…
>In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120106011107/http://www.k-1.co...
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race-card popular lately, but civil forfeiture is a problem here. More race you bring - less efficient you get with fighting real issue at hands. If you do little research - people of all races and sexes were hurt by that, and local/federal police benefitted from it.
Please don't do a dismissive handwave over what's really an important element to this story. That the victim is a person of color is absolutely relevant to this story; it demonstrates a bias on behalf of the DEA agent, or perhaps simply a cynicism: they know what they can get away with in the eyes of the public. Of COURSE race is an important element of how law enforcement interacts with citizens. Race is part of the…
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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…
What was the one credible plot? I have only ever heard of plots initiated by undercover FBI agents, often involving mentally ill patsies.
1) Pretty much every telecom system in the world uses the Internet to transmit their data stream at some point.
2) The NSA (whether through Agency-installed taps or data sharing agreements with others) has the ability to intercept all of the data that hits the Internet. Of the data that they intercept, they almost certainly retain every not-completely-useless bit.
3) Statistically speaking, someone involved in a credible terror plot has had that communication data cross the Internet. People aren't that good at OPSEC. Shit, even Army officers fuck OPSEC up from time to time.
4) 1, 2, and 3 mean that somewhere in NSA's vast data warehouse is evidence of a credible terror plot.
Note that I don't claim: "The NSA has learned of at least one credible terror plot using the data that they have obtained through their dragnet.". Indeed, if a plot had been stopped by data from the dragnet programs, I would expect that fact to be trumpeted from the rooftops. :)
They're drowning in data. They can't analyze it all. Pervasive full-take programs are bad for reasons beyond the obvious civil liberty ones.
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You could imagine reading it this way: DEA agents confronted the only black man in the train car and demanded he open his bags, shook him down, and stole his cash. In a brazen theft which DEA agents later claimed was legal under the veil of "civil forfeiture" the state prosecutor has refused to press charges, and the judge on the case has refused to provide relief for the plaintiff... I hope we continue to see a rele…
It's hard to get your money back because the government treats it as if it weren't your money. What happens is since the DEA can't prove you're involved in a crime they sue... your money. There will be a case in federal court that will be something like "Leonhart v $23,174". They don't even have to notify you. So. At this point you're not a party to the proceeding, so you can't do any of the normal things you'd do if…
I've seen it written many times that it often costs more to get the asset back than they're worth. That cost to the lawyer is also cost to the state and judicial system, and typically the justices don't take kindly to anyone wasting their time. I'm not reading about the massive backlog of forfeiture cases, mostly it seems like people don't even try.
On the one hand I hear that JDs are dropping like flies because there's no work, and on the other hand I hear there's tens of billions of dollars in money sitting in a big pot waiting for lawyers to try to get some of that back on contingency?
I found one blog after a bit of searching which has an interesting summary (criminal and civil forfeiture considered) I'm guessing that most people targeted, as usual, simply don't know their rights, and don't bother fighting for them, even when there's thousands of dollars on the line. [1]
The narrative that you can't get the money back I think is damaging to the cause of clamping down on forfeiture abuse. In fact you can get the money back [2], and particularly in cases like TFA, when the prosecutors office starts having to allocate a larger part of their workweek defending this bile they will start pushing back on it as well.
[1] - http://brendagrantland.com/truthjustice/how-to-defend-5th-am... [2] - http://fear.org