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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

#91

Post by SlowRobotAhead »

gamblor956 wrote: post #88
SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I agree, the table on your site says that. It's extremely wrong. Would have been much less obvious if they had selected the more important SCOTUS case just 2 years earlier. By pushing the agenda you implied with "2A against the states" you showed your cards to not care about the facts.

The table is correct. 100% correct. It's maintained by a law school, and is verified by a professor of Constitutional Law at least annually. As a lawyer, I trust the Cornell Legal Information Institute. I have used it in my practice.

You know how the CDC was banned from advocating gun control in 1996 because of the junk studies the Clinton admin pushed for in 1992 as justification for their upcoming gun control legislation? It came out of Harvard and Princeton. Almost all discredited, full data never released, one of the main "researches" still employed at Harvard.

Bloomberg just gave Johns Hopkins and Yale money to "study" gun control (with outcomes predetermined). And a few years ago gave Harvard $350 MILLION to push the same agenda.

You can take that garbage they push and eat it up, they're paying good money for exactly that.

I wonder what the Joyce Foundation gives to Cornell every year?

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

#92

Post by throwaway76543 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #80
throwaway76543 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your own link makes note that selective incorporation doesn't apply to the bill of rights." No, it doesn't. In fact, it clearly states the opposite noting that the 3rd, 7th, 9th and 10th amendments in the Bill of Rights have not been incorporated. On that page you can even find a table noting when each amendment in the Bill of Rights was incorporated. It quite clearly tells you that the 2nd amendment was incorporate…

Oh I agree, the table on your site says that. It's extremely wrong. Would have been much less obvious if they had selected the more important SCOTUS case just 2 years earlier. By pushing the agenda you implied with "2A against the states" you showed your cards to not care about the facts.

I don't have an agenda here, nor did I learn about these facts from the link above. You are simply spreading misinformation.

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

#94

Post by apo »

jaredklewis wrote: post #86
apo wrote: post #73

It boggles the mind to think that forfeiture is alive and well today, some police departments even brag about the state-sponsored hooliganism they're committing, and the practice has never been seriously challenged in the Supreme Court. This looks to be the defense: The Indiana Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Timbs, on interesting grounds. It said the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines did not apply to…

To start, I am totally horrified by civil forfeiture, so please no one construe this as defending it. But our personal opinions aside, I don't think the Indiana Supreme court decision is really very surprising from a legal perspective. The eight amendment is selectively incorporated and the excessive fines clause is not incorporated. The 14th amendment gave the courts the justification they needed to incorporate part…

The eight amendment is selectively incorporated and the excessive fines clause is not incorporated.

Interesting - what does "incorporation" mean in this context?

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

#95

Post by maehwasu »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #60
cabaalis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't for the life of me understand why the 10th amendment does not have a more prominent place in the American political system than it does. It is because government would be hamstrung if they respected it? It would seem to the layman that is the entire reason it exists!

Technically you're right. The 10th amendment has been largely neutered by selective incorporation, a very broad reading of the commerce clause, and other decisions. That said, the world in which the 10th amendment is very strong and the fourteenth is weak is much worse for civil rights. Suddenly the states can declare official support for Christianity, ban dissenting speech, shut down newspapers they dislike, search…

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.

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

#96

Post by dragonwriter »

Someone1234 wrote: post #37

Civil Forfeiture is essentially "guilty until proven innocent." And I don't mean that hyperbolically, I mean literally if the state takes property or cash under Civil Forfeiture you have to prove your property innocent to get it returned (via expensive civil litigation). That means that they can seize property or cash under a certain value with near impunity because the cost of recovering it is greater than the cost…

> Civil Forfeiture is essentially "guilty until proven innocent." And I don't mean that hyperbolically, I mean literally if the state takes property or cash under Civil Forfeiture you have to prove your property innocent to get it returned (via expensive civil litigation).

False generally, and specifically false for federal law forfeitures, where the burden is explicitly on the government to prove that the property is legally subject to forfeiture provided anyone with an interest in the property sized has asserted that interest.

If the property is subject to forfeiture (e.g., as an instrumentality of crime), the owner may still defeat forfeiture by establishing their own personal innocence, under the innocent owner rule: in this case the burden is on the owner, but this only comes into play when the property is proven subject to forfeiture. See, generally, 18 USC Sec. 983(c) and (d).

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

#98

Post by greggarious »

ricree wrote: post #44
mijoharas wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, could you explain what the 10th amendment is? (The Wikipedia page has some assumed knowledge that I do not have as I'm not American.)

The full text reads: >The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. What, exactly, this means has been a matter of ongoing debate for much of the amendment's existence. Some of the more fervent states' rights advocates have considered it a hard check on the power of the federal government, while at othe…

>On the other hand, it has come up more often than the Third (forced quartering of troops during times of peace)

I'm surprised no one has made a 3rd amendment argument against so called "wiretap rooms" in our nation's ISPs

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hub...

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

#99

Post by arwineap »

VectorLock wrote: post #75
slowburning wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some states it is illegal to defend against civil forfeiture practices using hidden compartments in your vehicle to store 100% legal property (e.g. cash, jewelry, confidential information)

Which states?

OH and CA both have laws on the books against creating (hidden compartment) or operating a vehicle with a hidden compartment if it's intended for something illegal. Drugs and guns is the common justification, but I wonder what would happen if you had say 15k in cash in a compartment.

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

#100

Post by jdpedrie »

koboll wrote: post #52
archon wrote: post #3

I'm worried that because this is a case in which the defendant actually did deal drugs, the court will rule in favor of the civil forfeiture laws and the SC case will then be used as a precedent to justify broader use of civil forfeiture. But IANAL, so maybe the danger isn't as big as I fear.

It would be a wild dereliction of the duty of SCOTUS to let the facts of a particular case influence their judgement on a broader legal question. Many cases get sent back to lower courts without resolving a broader legal question because the facts of a particular case weren't quite perfectly aligned to make it an appropriate vehicle to resolve a broad question. The political gerrymandering cases decided thus far this…

> The political gerrymandering cases decided thus far this term are a good example.

Masterpiece Cake Shop was as well. The court ruled in his favor, but was able to wiggle out of resolving the constitutional questions because of explicit bias on the part of the CO Civil Rights Commission.

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