The whole idea of a court case titled, e.g., "State of Texas vs $45,000" is asinine. I'd love to see the SCOTUS lay down the law on that bullshit.
The author of the article clearly thinks so, as much of the latter part of the article is speculation about how it will impact civil forfeiture, but I doubt it.
This case addressed money that the state only had a legal basis for seizing in the first place because of a criminal conviction which was later overturned; a ruling that the conviction being overturned is conclusive as to such seizures, and that the state cannot require a separate civil lawsuit to recover the funds in which innocence must be separately proven (which essentially would let them keep money premised on a criminal conviction with only the evidence necessary to secure a civil judgement) is not likely to be applicable to forfeiture cases, where the basis for the seizure is a civil process independent of criminal conviction.
"Armed with this ruling, the Nelson decision may set an important precedent to rein in another abusive civil proceeding: civil forfeiture. The parallels are striking"
Makes me wonder, could this ruling create a perverse situation where someone is arrested with a large sum of money, but the criminal case against the individual is flimsy, so the prosecution might be tempted to drop charges to ensure that the forfeiture can be kept rather than risk losing it if a conviction is overturned?
not guilty != convicted
suspected != convicted
Generally, not, as a matter of law. Civil forfeiture is usually premised on the item being gained through or used in illegal (though not necessarily criminal) activity, not necessarily by the owner (innocent parties with an interest in the property have some rights in forfeiture proceedings, separate from the right to assert that the basic premise of the forfeiture is false.)
This often overlaps with the owner of the property being suspected of a crime, but being owned by someone who committed a crime is not generally the essence of the legal premise.
That's quite distinct from what happened here, where the actual conviction is the legal premise, and thus the conviction being overturned voids the legal premise.
But it's clear, even outside of forfeiture, that that isn't a requirement for losing property to the state for wrongful conduct; civil process (with the government having a cause of action) does exist even outside of forfeiture, even for conduct which also has criminal punishment.
There has never been a principal accepted in this country that all government legal remedies against individuals require criminal conviction, which is what you seem to be asserting ad the principal with forfeiture.
It's clear that certain types of penalties require criminal conviction, and it's clear (now at least, though that should have been obvious before) that penalties expressly premised on criminal conviction require criminal conviction. But forfeiture doesn't really fall into either of those categories.
At some point in time someone arguing for the state was able to successfully introduce property as a "defendant" of a legal action, and average people go along with that. This is, on the face of it, absurd.
All of law exists only to a single purpose, the regulation of actions between humans, not trees, not dogs, not bits of paper with numbers printed on them, human beings.
Even someone's example of confiscating counterfeit money is not an action against the wrong doing of the money. It's an action against a human being who believed they were in possession of the money. They are the ones who suffer harm.
It is only reasonable for the state to confiscate the "money" from the subject, in this case because it is not money, and as such the harm to the subject was done not by the state's action of confiscation, but by the counterfeiter's action of tricking the subject into accepting it. It follows that it is not reasonable for the state to replace the fake money with real money because that would cause harm to a third party (the state). However, the subject would have a reasonable clam of restitution against the counterfeiter should they be convicted, and the state should support that claim.
Labeling an action as forfeiture, as in the case of civil forfeiture, implies a default due to some failure to perform, but that should be proven to the same degree as any question of law. The property does not act, or fail to act, only people can do that. Therefore the state must be obligated to prove that it has reasonable clam to the property, and that the party injured by confiscation are themselves guilty to the degree that such injury is warranted. AND as is the typical structure of law the state suffers the burden of proof to offset the potential for abuse of power.
IE "John Smith is found not guilty of trafficking for the drugs we thought he had on him, but he still could have got the $5000 from some other incidence of trafficking we failed to discover and therefore we're still charging his assets with trafficking".
So the "innocence" of the property can't be proven, and thus it is forfeited. So rather than "He still could have gotten the $5000 from a crime", they're saying "The $5000 could still have been transacted in a crime", and the guilt or innocence of the person it was taken from is considered irrelevant.
> Ginsburg forcefully rejected Colorado’s argument that “[t]he presumption of innocence applies only at criminal trials"
So now all the judges in the land have to rely on that. So people just have to sue in every single state, and federal circuit on civil forfeiture cases, and the judges will have to lean on the new Supreme Court opinions, or get it back to the Supreme Court so that they can clarify specifically on a civil forfeiture case.
(page 3: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf )
However, it doesn't change the rules, and it's by no means clear that the court would change the rules, if the question comes before it, nor does it suggest that the question will come up anytime soon.
If the court had ruled the other way in this case, there would be no chance of fixing civil forfeiture. So I guess you can say that this isn't a "no", but it's also not a "yes". It's not even a "maybe". But the door is still open?
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The idea is not asinine, it's perfectly rational.
Cops do a drug bust and all the criminals flee. (I'm personally opposed to drug prohibition but it's the law and the easiest example so I'm going with that for simplicity's sake.)
At the scene: 3 bricks of cocaine and $1m dollars. Cocaine is contraband so the cops don't need permission to take it, they can just help themselves to a few fat rails and then throw the rest in a furnace, resell it, or whatever.
What about the million bucks? It's property. there might even be a legitimate reason for it to be there (eg suppose it had just been stolen from a bank but the cops had yet to connect the bank robbery with the drug deal). The cops can't just take it, because if that was allowed then cops could just help themselves to any property they see and how would people ever know what happened to it? OK, so there must be some sort of process to document their taking possession of it until said possession is successfully challenged. That's a court's job.
On one side, the state entity that employs the cops. On the other...who? The (presumed) drug dealers fled so it's not obvious who the other side of the case should be. American law is built from the ground up around adversarial argument between parties with conflicting interests, so for administrative convenience we'd like to have the case be 'Someone v. someone else' like every other legal case. If we don't know who, let's treat the unclaimed property as its own entity until someone says different. Hence 'State of Jurisdiction v. $1 million.'
Practically speaking, this works fine most of the time. If you keep up with legal case news, in any port city you'll see a lot of cases like 'US Customs v. 1000 leather handbags' - sometimes because the handbags in question are knockoffs, sometimes because the paperwork got lost and a shipment ended up in the wrong place, to be later claimed by the rightful owner with documentation.
Asset seizure by police has been abused to hell and back, and I have no hesitation in saying that many police officers and institutions are corrupt. But the legal mechanism for classifying abandoned property is not the problem. That's a purely administrative convenience that is entirely neutral in nature. If you didn't have it, then cops would just label the money as 'evidence', it would disappear, and the problem would be worse because there wouldn't even be a paper trail to follow.
Here's a some search hits under "civil forfeiture cases"
[1] NFL defensive tackle Letroy Guion was stopped and had 190k of cash seized. He had bank statements to prove the provenance of the money.
[2] Overview of cases and depts sued for systematically seizing cash from people stopped, but never charged with a crime.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/11/civil-asset-forfeit...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2014/03/12/...
I was explaining the operational legal reason for the existence of court cases in which one of the parties is an an inanimate object, nothing more.
> this won't have a direct bearing on civil asset forfeiture of the kind you describe, because that only takes place where the identity of the property owner is unknown
I also frequently make typos and consistently spell a few words wrong. Are there any other nits you'd like to pick?
Can you perhaps expand on why this assumption hasn't been successfully challenged as a basis for overturning many of these other cases where there clearly is a property owner? That's the head scratcher to me in how long this practice has continued.
I'm sorry that I don't always make it clear enough when I'm making a narrow technical argument vs when I'm making a sweeping ideological one. I am 100% against police departments being able to profit from civil asset forfeiture, both because the incentives for abuse become overwhelming and because the existence of abuse is then used by others as a pretext for undermining the system within which such rules originate.
My personal concepts of the relation between individuals, society, government, law, and justice, are radically outside the mainstream, which is why you should consider switching to a monarchy and installing me as King, or Queen. On the other hand, distilling those radical ideas down to a manageable set of operational principals that don't require everyone to be a philosopher is difficult, which is why you should probably hold off on the coronation for a bit.
> Guion was charged with two felonies, one for the marijuana and another for possession of a firearm in commission of a felony. Police secured the cash, though Guion’s agent claims the money was from NFL paychecks and that he has bank statements proving it was not related to the drugs. A spokesperson for the Starke Police Department told The Huffington Post they have not received this documentation and that they gave Guion a receipt stating their intent to permanently seize the cash.
Constitutionally, seizure (the money has not yet been forfeited, only seized) only requires probable cause. Finding a large amount of cash next to almost a pound of illegal drugs is undoubtedly probable cause to conclude that the money is the proceeds of illegal activity.
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2015/03/24/letroy-guion...
With a plea deal and 5k fine & court fees, "the charges were dismissed without adjudication of guilt.
There’s still a civil forfeiture case pending, so he can get his money back."
So now there is no criminal basis for the state holding onto his money...
Edit: 5k court fees -> 5k fine & court fees
I really hope the practice is stopped because it is unconstitutional and abused horribly. In terms of abuse, after the police take someone's money, say they find $10k in cash on you. The police demand proof of its origin (now this of course is once again Guilty until proven Innocent which was hopefully struck down now by SCOTUS), then you go to the police with your proof. The police will cast doubt on your proof, tell you to go to Court and spend $5k of legal fees to reclaim your $10k OR they very kindly say let's just refund you $7k and call it even. This is regular practice. Police stations have been found buying helicopters and other things with such funds (the Washington Post had a great expose on this).
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