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Comment by playeren | Hacker News Reader

Terrible story. Civil forfeiture seems utterly incompatible with any notion of a just society. It's like democracy just gave up and regressed to feudalism.

Even _if_ the author had turned out to be 100% guilty of whatever Amazon accused them of - this form of civil forfeiture is still punishment without trial and not in line with the sixth amendment.

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

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Civil forfeiture is so ingrained into our "justice" system, that some jurisdictions even budget for it.

It's really, really easy for the government to justify it. All they need to do, is run out the one case in a hundred, where some death-dealing Walter White is stopped.

Is there even one?

Oh, I'm sure there's plenty of real ones. Humans can be absolute trash, and most authoritarians have no problem, finding "justification" for their iron fists.

But we tend to think that unusual events are far more common than they actually are, and they use that to manufacture outrage and justification.

I don't remember what the term is, but this fallacy is a known one.

Yes, of course. Civil forfeiture can be (and is!) abused, especially by local jurisdictions, but it's often a very boring tool used to facilitate victim restitution.

E.g. look at that famous chart showing 'the police steal more than criminals': https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/files/2015/11/...

Nearly $2B of that 2014 total was JP Morgan having their funds 'civilly forfeit' to directly pay restitution to the Madoff victims (https://www.nathanslaw.com/articles/bank-to-pay-almost-2-bil...).

No evidence there of a "walter white" being stopped.

Restitution can be ordered by a court without requiring a process to confiscate money without so much as a charge

IIRC, the original point of civil forfeiture was to remove the possibility of the accused, between the start of a criminal suit (or even before) and the outcome of the trial, from moving their assets to somewhere beyond the reach of the court.

The goal itself seems reasonably (though not perfectly) noble.

The use of this ability in the real world though ... not so much.

The “one case in a hundred” is when a ship is facing fees it can’t pay so the cargo is seized.

This belongs in maritime law, and nowhere else.

Seriously. I believe victims of civil forfeiture should be given their money back + an amount equal to, say, the average stock market returns over the period it was gone (or at least a base 4-5%) as reimbursement of the opportunity cost and as a deterrence against frivolous seizure.

That seems way too low. If you rob a bank and give the money back later with 4% interest, you still go to jail. This should just not be legal. Or make it 100%/mo interest or something stupendous to discourage it in all but the most extreme cases.

A bit of realpolitik on my part, I'm afraid. I think even my suggestion would be a challenge to get passed in any state, let alone federally.

Civil forfeiture is horrible. I've spent hundreds of hours in the forfeiture court.

I remember one time the prosecutor was trying to forfeit a man's brand new $60,000 SUV because the man's son had borrowed the car and driven drunk. Luckily it was a cool judge (the rarest of the rare!) and she beat the prosecutors down "Did this man know his son borrowed the car? No." "Does this man have valid license and insurance? Yes? Give him his car back. And you know what, give him all his fines and fees and his towing fee back too. What do you mean you don't know how to give him his towing fee back? FIND OUT."

The same judge.. on her first day on the bench in the forfeiture court.. I was there early and she brought the two forfeiture prosecutors up to the bench and whispered to them "Look, you two win 95% of the cases in this court simply because no-one can even figure out how to file the paperwork to get their case into court. I won't stand for that. That isn't happening in my court room. That's all."

Which is true. In Illinois at least, if your assets get seized, you just get a letter saying you have 45 days to file all the required paperwork to even get your case into court to START defending yourself. And it says specifically on the paperwork that the State will not help you with any aspect of this filing, nor will they provide any of the required forms.

Most forfeiture cases are very, very badly prosecuted because they so rarely get challenged. If you ever have your assets seized, fight it. Most of the time you'll easily win, or the prosecutor will give up.

The BIGGEST thing by far is that the prosecutor will do a plea negotiation with you on your assets!! I proxy negotiated for people all the time. To avoid trial (no party wants this) the prosecutor will come and tell you "We'll give you 50% of your money back today if you sign away the rest". I promise you, you can get this to 80% of your money back.

You can also use frozen assets as bargaining chips in a criminal case. With the drug dealer I mentioned earlier, he had $150,000 taken from one account. For the final deal on his prison time I got his lawyer to negotiate them giving him back $80,000 of the drug money! I could have got his cars back too, but the feds had them and he didn't want to poke that bear.

p.s. if you have a new car with a loan and you've not made many payments, let the prosecutor know - they usually don't want your car as it'll become a paperwork nightmare.

p.p.s. if you have your assets seized, check the jurisdiction. In these cases the asset is considered a guilty party to the crime and must be prosecuted in the correct jurisdiction (court), which might be different to where the crime happened or where the assets were seized.

>I promise you, you can get this to 80% of your money back.

That may have happened in this case, where the couple agreed to a deal in which the state kept 1/6 of the funds.

I'm not sure this is a big a win for justice as you think it is.

If he gave the car with permission, he has a big problem.

If the son drove it without permission, it sounds like the son ought to get both a DUI and an auto theft charge.

There's been a serious problem in BC, where kids afflicted by affluenza race their parents' cars on public roadways. Luxury cars doing 50, 70 kmh over the speed limit. If I did that in my car, it would be seized from me. If these cars' legal owner doesn't want their cars seized for this sort of stuff, they shouldn't be giving the kids the keys.

Just to clarify my story above, kid had taken keys without Dad's knowledge.

Dad might be a bad parent, he might not. Lots of good parents have kids who do dumb stuff. I had great parents and I ended up in jail. So I can't say I think Dad deserved to lose his car.

It's not a win for justice and wasn't presented as one. It was a stroke of luck and a little very welcomed self-help advice.

> If the son drove it without permission, it sounds like the son ought to get both a DUI and an auto theft charge.

There is no way justice would be served by convicting the son of auto theft if the owner of the vehicle (i.e. the dad)—the only one with any actual standing in the case—has no interest in pressing charges. Fines or jail time for a DUI conviction with no evidence of actual harm resulting from the event is already pushing the boundaries of a rationally justifiable, proportional response. (Revoking the son's driving license, on the other hand, would be a reasonable and predictable outcome.)

> There is no way justice would be served by convicting the son of auto theft if the owner of the vehicle

The vehicle was either taken with permission, or without permission.

You don't get to launder responsibility by doing crime using someone else's stuff.

> Fines or jail time for a DUI conviction with no evidence of actual harm resulting from the event is already pushing the boundaries of a rationally justifiable, proportional response.

No, it's not. This isn't the 60s anymore. Every time you drive drunk, you are playing Russian roulette with the lives of everyone around you. It's gross disregard for human life. It's going out onto the street, loading a gun, closing your eyes, spinning in a circle, and pulling the trigger.

If you're an idiot minor whose teenage brain cannot bridge the concepts of cause and effect, as with most crimes, some leniency can be expected, but in the general case, this is an incredibly serious thing.

I was about to comment exactly what you commented, thank you.

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