>> The [Shelby, Tex] county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case
they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care.
Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services. <<
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>> In September, 2007, he and his fiancée
had had their infant son taken from them hours after Barry Washington pulled them over for “traveling in left lane marked for passing only,” according to the police report. No evidence of drugs or other contraband was found, and neither parent had a criminal record. Even so, Washington seized a large sum of cash that Agostini, who has family in the area, said he’d brought with him to buy restaurant equipment at a local auction. Lynda Russell, the district attorney, then arrived at the scene, sending Agostini and his fiancée, a nursing student at the University of Maryland, to jail for the night.
In police surveillance footage, Agostini can be heard pleading with Russell, “Can I kiss my son goodbye?”
Afterward, Russell dryly recounted to a colleague, “I said no, kiss me.” <<
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>> She was left struggling to make her car payments each month as her Honda sat in a city lot [impounded while her son was driving it], unused and unsheltered from the elements. The bond, the loans, and the public-transportation costs added up. “There were days I didn’t have a good meal,” she told me in February, sitting beneath her daughter’s quinceañera portrait in her narrow fuchsia-painted row house.
... At a public hearing on July 11th, D.C.’s attorney general, Irvin Nathan, acknowledged “very real problems” relating to due-process rights. But he warned that millions of dollars raised by forfeiture “could very easily be lost” and “an unreasonable burden” placed on his office if the reforms supported by the Public Defender Service were enacted. He proposed more modest changes that would leave the current burden of proof untouched. <<
Get that? He says, "yeah it's wrong but if we do the right thing and honor citizens' Constitutional rights we won't make as much money as we do now, so .... **** it".
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>> ...police pulled Morrow over for “
driving too close to the white line,” and took thirty-nine hundred dollars from him. Morrow told Guillory that he was on his way to get dental work done at a Houston mall. (The arresting officers said that his “stories of travel” were inconsistent, as was his account of how much money he had; they also said they detected the “odor of burned marijuana,” although no contraband was found in the car.) Morrow, who is black, was taken to jail, where he pleaded with authorities to call his bank to see proof of his recent cash withdrawal. They declined.
“They impounded my car, and they impounded me, too,” Morrow told me, recalling the night he spent in jail.
When he finally agreed to sign away his property, he was released on the side of the road with no money, no vehicle, and no phone. “I had to go to Wal-Mart and borrow someone’s phone to call my mama,” he recounted. “She had to take out a rental car to come pick me up. <<
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>> In West Philadelphia last August, an elderly couple named Mary and Leon Adams were finishing breakfast when several vans filled with heavily armed police pulled up to their red brick home. An officer announced, “
We’ll give you ten minutes to get your things and vacate the property.” The men surrounding their home had been authorized to enter, seize, and seal the premises,
without any prior notice.
“I was almost numb,” Mary Adams, a 68-year-old grandmother with warm brown eyes and wavy russet hair, recalled. When I visited her this spring, she sat beside her 70-year-old husband, who was being treated for pancreatic cancer, and was slumped with exhaustion. A little earlier, he had struggled to put on his embroidered blue-and-yellow guayabera shirt; his wife, looking fit for church in a green jacket, tank top, and slacks, watched him attentively as he shuffled over on a carved-wood cane to greet me. Leon explained his attachment to their home in numerical terms. “1966,” he said. “It’s been our home since 1966.”
The police returned about a month after the raid. Owing to the allegations against Leon, Jr., [
for a $20 marijuana sale] the state was now seeking to take the Adams’ home and to sell it at a biannual city auction, with the proceeds split between the district attorney’s office and the police department. A
ll of this could occur even if Leon, Jr., was acquitted in criminal court; in fact, the process could be completed even before he stood trial.
Mary Adams was at a loss. She and her husband were accused of no crime. Instead, the civil case was titled
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. The Real Property and Improvements Known as [their address]. For years, Mary had volunteered for the Philadelphia More Beautiful Committee, and as a block captain she always thought that civil forfeiture was reserved for crack houses and abandoned eyesores. Now her own carefully maintained residence was the
target. <<
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The story goes into the particularly egregious Tehana practices and the class action suit brought against it:
"Civil forfeiture" my ass. Let's call it what it is, since we already have a name for it:
.
Legalized piracy, a collusion between the corrupt übermilitarized police-state that sees itself as an autonomous occupying army, corrupt local DAs and a corrupt justice system, all working to line its own pockets under the pretense of "the war on drugs". Which was complete bullshit from its beginning.
>> In the Colonial period, the English Crown issued “writs of assistance” that permitted customs officials to enter homes or vessels and seize whatever they deemed contraband. As the legal scholars Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen have noted, these writs were “among the key grievances that triggered the American Revolution.” The new nation’s Bill of Rights would expressly forbid “unreasonable searches and seizures” and promise that no one would be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process.” Nonetheless, Congress soon authorized the use of civil-forfeiture actions against pirates and smugglers. It was easier to prosecute a vessel and seize its cargo than to try to prosecute its owner, who might be an ocean away. In the ensuing decades, the practice fell into disuse and, aside from a few brief revivals, remained mostly dormant for the next two centuries. <<
