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U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

nytimes.com

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Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#161

Post by chrisoverzero »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #63
torstenvl wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are incorrect, Sir. Grandparent is correct. May I recommend that you re-read the link? It says exactly the opposite of what you claim.

Someone at Cornell wrote that 2A was incorporated then, but that's ridiculous as if ANYTHING it would have been incorporated federally during 2008's Heller vs DC. If someone attaches the name of a university to something do you automatically take it as fact?

> if ANYTHING it would have been incorporated federally

> incorporated federally

From Wikipedia:

> Incorporation […] is the doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights have been made applicable to the states.

You seem to be operating outside of your area of expertise. There is no such thing as "federal incorporation" because the Constitution already applies to the federal government.

I recommend reading (at least the very end of) the majority opinion in McDonald before making any further arguments about which case established what.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#162

Post by sjwright »

another-one-off wrote: post #160
sjwright wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem strange at all. It's not the Supreme Court's fault that the defendant or plaintiff in any particular case are scummy or sympathetic, nobodies or famous, weak or powerful. They are aware that their decisions will affect many more people. They need to create law which caters for the for the wrongly accused as much as it does the rightly accused.

Everything you said is actually pretty strange. I'm on board with it, but the default what-humans-try-on-the-first-pass approach is to consider each case on its own merits including the people involved (and runs smack-bang into the various -isms, eg, racism). The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice. This system…

> Everything you said is actually pretty strange. ... The idea that a scummy and a sympathetic defendant will get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice.

This is like a topsy-turvy world. The idea that a scummy or sympathetic defendant would not get the same treatment is genuinely weird and not at all an instinctive approach to justice.

Equal treatment under the law is justice. The only thing that should distinguish a scummy or sympathetic defendant are the __facts__ in their respective cases. Not the law.

By the time a case reaches the Supreme Court, it is never really about the defendant—the facts of a case are almost never in dispute—the question is usually a very narrow disagreement over a particular matter of law.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#163

Post by adrianratnapala »

unholiness wrote: post #110
jedberg wrote: post #56

What I've learned recently is that most people only read headlines when it comes to Supreme Court cases, and the headlines are written to be intentionally misleading. Most Supreme Court cases have a lot of nuance to them that most people miss. For example, in this thread, people keep saying that United States v. Ursery upheld Civil Forfeiture, but it did no such thing. The case was about whether CF is a criminal puni…

You seem to have a more accurate perspective on this case than most of the comments. Thank you for posting. But I'm still confused on one point: It seems like the supreme court has already ruled that the 8th Amendment applies to the states in Roper v. Simmons[0], Robinson v. California [1], and others. To me this pretty directly means that a state law dictating a cruel and unusual punishment is unconstitutional. So i…

Apparently[1] it is not about the 8th amendment as a whole, but only about the excessive-fines clause. Everyone seems to agree that the rest of the amendment has already been incorporated.

[1]: http://reason.com/volokh/2018/06/19/supreme-court-will-hear-...

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#164

Post by uxp »

mannykannot wrote: post #150
topmonk wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking him to prove a negative. The onus should be on you.

Not at all - one can very reasonably assume that 'very frequently' means after it has been discovered during a traffic stop, in which case it is valid to ask how often djrogers has been in that situation.

A mostly unrelated and offtopic comment: It's been a misconception that the $20 and $100 U.S. Dollar bills contain some RFID-like passive tracking capability embedded within the "ribbon" security feature. If you want to have an expensive and uneventful couple minutes, put a $20 in a microwave for a few seconds to "disable" the chip, but be sure to have a cup of water around. The foil-beanie wearing crowd claims that the result of the microwaving, which burns Jackson's face, is proof. Nevermind the actual fact that a majority of the ink on the front of the bill is on Jackson's face, and that the ink contains metal used for pigmenting and other proprietary security measures which is likely the reason it smolders or catches fire first.

Anyways, the reason I bring this up is to highlight the paranoia of some that think that long-range RFID scanners can actually locate large stacks of highly valuable "untraceable" currency, which might be used by the highway patrol to identify potential targets to pull over for civil asset forfeiture reasons.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cache-point/

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#165

Post by conanbatt »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #129
cuckcuckspruce wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The colloquial definition used by most of the US citizenry and on television news programs on both 24-hour cable networks and broadcast television. That doesn't make that definition correct...

> The colloquial definition used by most of the US citizenry and on television news programs on both 24-hour cable networks and broadcast television. Could you be more specific?

Fiscally liberal, socially liberal.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#167

Post by beart »

topmonk wrote: post #145
lostcolony wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you were pulled over, and it was discovered? I mean, even if you were, that constitutes X data points, which is hardly representative.

You're asking him to prove a negative. The onus should be on you.

Without a conclusive study, the only proven conclusion is that "large amounts of cash are sometimes seized, sometimes not". However, a study could reveal that this happens very typically, or not very typically (for some definition of typical). In either case, that is not proving a negative.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#168

Post by jaredklewis »

ccleve wrote: post #144

What bothers me about the article is that they say that the basis of the claim is the 8th Amendment ("excessive fines"). I hope that is not the only argument the lawyers made. The problem with relying on the 8th alone is that the word "excessive" is imprecise, and there's good reason for the Supreme Court to defer to local legislatures to define what it means, except in extreme cases. Deciding criminal penalties are…

Mandatory disclaimer that I think civil forfeiture sucks.

While I agree with you personally, I think legally that would be very far from a slam dunk case.

The situation in this case seems similar to the one in Bennis v. Michigan, where SCOTUS already ruled that the civil forfeiture did not violate the takings clause of the 5th amendment. So the 5A angle seems like a risky argument.

On the other hand, the waters surrounding the 8th amendment are very murky. As recounted in the Indiana SC decision, their basis for determining that the excessive fines clause is unincorporated comes from the 2010 McDonald decision, a case that had nothing to do with the 8th amendment at all. It was only mentioned in passing, so this was not a holding but merely dictum. SCOTUS had previously said in dictum that the excessive fines clause was incorporated. So there hasn't been a full holding, plus two contradictory dictums in a relatively short period. That's fairly murky, whereas Bennis vs Michigan is basically clear with regards to the 5th amendment.

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#169

Post by gamblor956 »

jmalicki wrote: post #147
gamblor956 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obama eventually did plug the hole... It wasn't that big of an issue until after the recession (i.e., during his second term), so it simply wasn't on his radar while he dealt with more pressing issues. Moreover, civil forfeiture is allowed under federal law under very broad terms. It took quite a bit of time after it became an issue to draft a policy that would allow it to continue but end the excesses. Obama couldn'…

"Obama eventually did plug the hole..." citation?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/attorney-general-prohibits-fe...

Re: U.S. Supreme Court to hear civil forfeiture case

#170

Post by firic »

r00fus wrote: post #106
maehwasu wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the margin, people would begin moving to different states. The current system has some pros (which you enumerate), but also some massive cons in the form of high exit costs, since you're exiting the entire federal apparatus rather than the government of a single state.

> At the margin, people would begin moving to different states. "They can simply move away" is a fantasy solution. 99% people would/could not move until/unless it became a crisis situation. Sure, you could move, but what about your infirm parents? The costs are already high for between-states moves.

There is a reason communist countries had to close their boarder. Because if they didn't, too many of the good people would leave andv that would hurt the country to much. If enough people could leave a communist country to cause them to worry, then surly moving from oppressive states should be common
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