Using loophole, Seward County seizes millions from motorists without convictions
klkntv.com
klkntv.com
ETA: Yes, everyday you drive through this county you will see cops searching vehicles (usually out of state plates, CO/CA/IL the most obvious). Almost feel bad for legit people driving through I80 with out of state plates, but the's what happens when you have a low population state with a major thoroughfare. They have some really clever social engineering tactics too that a former worker of mine tipped me on.
Well, not really - that's what happens when you don't fully fund your law enforcement at a state or federal level and instead leave them to fund themselves through fines and seizures. Local authorities shouldn't be allowed to keep a single penny of anything they seize or any fines they rack up. They should be fully funded by higher-level authorities based on demonstrated need. The current setup is rife with obvious moral hazard.
It's not our responsibility to fund every bumblefuck police force with a staff of 5 in a town with a population of 500. They shouldn't even have jurisdiction on a federally funded interstate.
> It's not our responsibility to fund every bumblefuck police force with a staff of 5 in a town with a population of 500. They shouldn't even have jurisdiction on a federally funded interstate.
Either fund it or shut it down. Either is fine with me. It's the extant-but-unfunded middle ground that's obviously broken.
Don't know where you put seized assets though because it gets sticky wherever they go.
(But they should remain legally liable for returning the money if/when the legal process says so.)
The officer testified to various pieces of information that he obtained during the stop that led him to believe that Bouldin intended to purchase a large amount of marijuana with the seized money. Among other things, the officer testified that Bouldin told the officer he was traveling from his home in Virginia to Colorado; that a certified drug dog positively indicated the presence of illegal narcotics in the vehicle; that Bouldin's phone had pictures of marijuana taken in both Virginia and Colorado; that a Colorado area code phone number had sent text messages to Bouldin's phone containing photographs and video of what the officer identified as marijuana and "THC wax"; that Bouldin had sent text messages to the same number requesting "8 widow" and "8 goat"; and that in the officer's opinion, the person using the other phone number was offering to sell marijuana and "THC wax," and that Bouldin was agreeing to make a purchase. The State also introduced evidence that Bouldin had previously been convicted in Utah of attempted possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute.
Bouldin's attorney did an abysmal job with this case, with Bouldin originally failing to appear at all, and then filing an appeal that failed to state any meaningful arguments. Again: obviously, there's a counterpoint that people shouldn't have to hire lawyers to keep their cash, I get it.
> There, on the side of the road, 1,300 miles from his Virginia home, in a state where Bouldin knew no one, a sheriff’s deputy handed him a form.
> You can sign this piece of paper, abandon the $18,000, avoid arrest and continue on to Colorado, he says he was told.
> Don’t sign, and you will go to jail. You could face felony charges. Your van will be towed. Your dog will be taken to the pound.
I don't care how many laws he'd broken in the past, law enforcement officers should never be allowed to act that way. If they sincerely believed he was breaking the law, their duty was to arrest him and let him be tried by a jury. Offering to let him go in exchange for $18k in cash is pure corruption no matter how you slice it: either he was an innocent victim of extortion, or they were asking for a bribe to let him off the hook.
Oh and of course, you can actually be locked up for that time. Legally. No worries. If you're found innocent you get 14$ per day locked up. And usually urgent medical care is provided to inmates after a month or two by an intern (not an actual doctor).
I mean "just refuse" is not going to work. These people use violence.
Accepting all that you quoted to be true it still leaves hanging the question of what right do Seward County police have to do anything about any of that.
Marijuana is legal in Colorado, there was none in the car (was there?) despite what the alledged dog sniff indicated, and while pictures of drugs and begging requests from others to "get some while you're there" are indicators of potential future crimes .. they are not crimes in and of themselves (to the best of my knowledge of US law (I'm in Australia)).
I uderstand the suspicion but I'm honestly not seeing an actual crime.
So: those county sheriffs probably weren't lying that they could jam Bouldin up --- not simply because they can do that to anybody with $18k in cash in their van, but because of the totality of the evidence they collected.
Maybe with 18k he was planning on taking a longer route home or retiring in Colorado or something.
Nebraska is a "substantial step" attempt liability state (he's lucky he didn't get pulled over in Kansas, which is an "any overt act" state!). Maybe he'd have had a good case; maybe the evidence wouldn't be compelling enough for a Nebraska jury. But maybe that case survives long enough for $18k to be a bargain, compared to the legal fees to beat the trafficking rap.
I don't know. But these details weren't in the article --- the summary that was presented was deliberately sanded down to make Bouldin more sympathetic. By the logic on this thread --- logic I largely agree with --- it shouldn't matter how sympathetic Bouldin is. The author of the article should have trusted us with the whole story.
The "abandonment" form and negotiation, sounds quite a bit like legalized bribery. But with Bouldin, given the evidence (to what you quote, the supreme court summary [1] adds that his prior conviction involved twelve pounds of marijuana, and that his car had a vacuum sealer and boxes of vacuum seal bags) he was, more likely than not, on a trip to smuggle marijuana.
But rather than being something to be hidden in discussing the case, that Bouldin was more likely than not to be planning on smuggling is, I would argue, an example of one of the major problems with civil forfeiture: it subverts the justice system by moving cases from criminal standards of beyond reasonable doubt to civil standards of preponderance of the evidence. The American justice system is not built on convicting people who are more likely than not to be guilty, nor on declining to even prosecute them, which might be much less profitable to the county, in favor of just taking their money.
And at the same time, that it uses civil cases is what makes it harder to combat. It doesn't seem like the courts here had to be willing participants in this behavior, or accept ridiculous evidence, they just had to apply the law and civil standards. The money was more likely than not to be for the purpose of smuggling marijuana. With those standards, it doesn't seem likely that Bouldin had much of a case. The problem is that those are not supposed to be the standards, and that the process seems to create very problematic incentives.
Without taking an opinion on drugs themselves, or laws around them, a cynical view here is that civil forfeiture used in this way actually makes it in the interest of the county to encourage drug trafficking through their jurisdiction, and to avoid catching traffickers with drugs, or catching them too often. How much more convenient it must be to simply take some cash, without the need to actually arrest and prosecute anyone. And how much more profitable, rather than imprisoning a trafficker, to let potential traffickers continue on their way, their cash seized, to continue trafficking and thus have some chance of being caught and have their cash seized again. And surely it would not be wise to take money too often, or make trafficking too difficult, along that route, in which case traffickers might choose to take their business elsewhere. It seems to make the process more like a bizarre and adversarial tariff scheme rather than anti-drug enforcement.
So, in those senses, even if it is mostly, or even only, taking money from likely traffickers, it is still extremely problematic. There should not be a need to hide this when discussing it.
[1] https://supremecourt.nebraska.gov/state-v-eighteen-thousand-...
> The money was more likely than not to be for the purpose of smuggling marijuana.
What is the basis of these claims? Do you have any statistics backing it up? Do you, for example, know how often Bouldin drives with cash in his car and do you know how often Bouldin engages in smuggling of marijuana with said cash?
The point here is that, if the police had nothing to offer against Bouldin, beyond that he had some cash, then civil forfeiture wouldn't have made that much difference, because he did actually challenge it: cases where people with no evidence at all against them are convinced not to challenge civil forfeiture are different, but that was not the case here. Civil forfeiture seems most dangerous in these cases where a reasonable person would look at the evidence and think that maybe the person was in the process of committing a crime, because it makes that 'maybe' enough, when in reputable criminal justice systems it wouldn't be. And when 'maybe' is enough to punish someone, then innocent people are likely to get hurt.
To me it's quite obvious this is just government condoned theft. The police and politicians involved should all be ashamed of themselves. And then frankly they should be punished.
What?
> Bouldin made his decision while standing on the shoulder of I-80 as cars whizzed by. He decided he wasn’t worried about the felony charges – there was nothing illegal in his van. He wouldn’t sign.
> The Seward County deputies didn’t arrest him, as they had said they would. But they did seize his cash while charging him with a misdemeanor for possessing drug money – charges that were later dropped.
> The county attorney continued with the seizure in civil court in order to keep the $18,000. Bouldin received only a warning for the traffic violation that started it all.
What do you say they would presumably charge him with criminal attempt of Neb. 28-416? They charged him with a misdemeanor for possessing drug money. Then they dropped it.
Frankly I'm amazed they wasted their time charging with anything when they can simply steal his money regardless of any charges.
?
>> Bouldin made his decision while standing on the shoulder of I-80 as cars whizzed by. He decided he wasn’t worried about the felony charges – there was nothing illegal in his van. He wouldn’t sign.
That is from the post by me that you're currently responding to. Notice the last sentence.
That was the initial motivation for this particular comment thread: the article excludes essentially all of the evidence the state presented in court against Bouldin. Readers have to look at other sources, like court summaries, to find that evidence. The state did present evidence, if weak, with text messages, equipment, and prior convictions, while Bouldin didn't present anything meaningful, and in a civil case, he needed to. That's how the civil court system works, as problematic as it is.
The article both presents a legitimate grievance, and presents it misleadingly, which is what makes it frustrating to me.
I feel like even entertaining these conversations about what crime the individual may have been contemplating allows the conversation to be derailed. If the individual had been caught in the act of handing over cash for illegal drugs, it would still be an outrageous corruption for the police to simply seize that cash and use it for their own purposes. It’s obviously a huge conflict of interest, and we should all be arguing for banning the practice regardless of the circumstances.
Even if you require a conviction before CAF can be applied, it means that police funding is directly tied to number of convictions instead of the health of the community, and in particular ties funding to convictions in cases where large amounts of money are involved. This disincentivizes preventatory measures of any sort (because preventing crime brings no profit in the short term and decreases profit in the long term), and it means that rather than focusing on crime that has a substantial impact on the health of the community police officers are incentivized to focus on crimes that are likely to net a large amount of cash, which is not a great predictor for the actual impact on society.
I'm saying that the police requisitioning his $18k and that money going towards the department budget creates perverse incentives for the police. If that money went to funding schools the problem would be much less severe. But when the head of the police department gets CAF money added to the top line of his budget, it will shape the way he directs his force, and the incentives it gives him are wrong.
(b) I still don't understand the conflict you're talking about. In your hypothetical, this money is exactly what civil asset forfeiture was designed to capture: the proceeds and instrumentalities of a crime.
If you want to argue that he wasn't guilty of any crime, and therefore the money should have been returned, that makes perfect sense! But the hypo you've provided here doesn't make sense.
No, you've confused criminal asset forfeiture (which exists for that purpose, and hinges on an actual conviction of an actual crime) with civil asset forfeiture (a product of admiralty law meant, in theory to make ship owners exert tighter control of their crews without extending criminal liability to them for the crews crimes, by making ships themselves forfeit for those crimes even though crews weren’t owners, that mostly hung around as a disused appendage in American law until it got seized on as an end run around criminal process in Prohibition, and later exploded in the War on Drugs.)
Given this, I don't understand the point of the rest of your post. The cop suspects he might commit a crime in the future, but there is no evidence of a crime being committed. It should just end right there.
Next question!
It's unjust, but many of the victims are actual criminals and so nothing is done.
Very few of the victims are criminals.
https://www.nemannlawoffices.com/blog/law-enforcement-seized...
> One more data point supports this contention: At the federal level, at least, "the vast majority of forfeiture victims are never convicted or charged with a crime," according to Carpenter. Using data obtained via FOIA requests, Carpenter found that 87 percent of federal forfeiture proceedings were civil cases, not criminal ones. "It's troubling that 87% of the time the conviction appears to be irrelevant," co-author Lisa Knepper said.
So the people who can afford to lose the money (criminals) get to avoid a charge just by bribing the cops, and the people who did nothing wrong have to pay the cops.
Crooked all around.
Policing in the us is a nightmare.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2017/05/30/...
She let her son live with her, he sold less than $200 of marijuana, and her home (lived in since the 1970s) and car were seized as facilitating a drug transaction. She eventually won, after more than seven years.
How did we end up with so many people in law enforcement and the judicial system who have accepted “the end justifies the means” or “you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette”?
I would love to see legislation at every level forbidding civil fines and forfeitures from benefitting the locality imposing them. Let such revenue go to the state or federal treasury and forbid any kickback type scheme (which is how the federal government hooks localities on CAF; they split the take).
What would cause it to stop happening?
State control over the police in the US is imperfect, and, since the US is a fundamentally flawed democracy for deep structural reasons, popular control over the state is even more limited. Thus there are two separate reasons why this wouldn’t be stopped even if most people were against it (which is by no means clear anyway).
I’d like to dream that it would become fairly obvious to the majority that these institutions simply are not under actual popular control, have no true accountability, and are in baldfaced defiance of the country’s founding principles and Constitution. I have yet to hear any convincing argument that this assessment is wrong, so hopefully the number of Americans who agree will someday reach a critical mass.
It's not that the police are right, it's that if you get harassed by the police or pulled over etc that you clearly did something wrong, and people will contort themselves into a pretzel to make that logic true.
It is slowly being fixed, however.
> The sheriff’s office has specialized in and perfected the practice, known as civil asset forfeiture, despite a 2016 law meant to ban it in Nebraska.
Other laws have either passed, not been passed, or are being written in other states. I’m not going to dig up more citations for a dead thread buried in the HN archives—it is easy enough to find out about these laws being passed. If you can’t find information on Wikipedia, you will have to look elsewhere. I know traditional news sources carry stories about legislation, so I recommend starting there.
>The 2016 law was designed to require a criminal conviction before the state could seize money, according to the bill’s statement of intent.
>But the Legislature left two loopholes. Seizures over $25,000 could circumvent state law entirely by being adopted into federal court.
>And law enforcement could still seize assets under state law if evidence connected the cash to drugs – even if there are no drugs in the car.
Because law enforcement is determined to steal people's money.
Because nationally its been upheld as constitutional and would require a constitutional amendment.
This interpretation of the sixth amendment isn't open to other interpretations. Specifically that civil cases are different than criminal cases, so they civilly charge the asset itself and the not the human being. Whoops.
Subsequently, some states started changing their own laws to stop the practice in their state, including the state in this article but it didn't work.
Obviously if they started seizing bank branches under probably cause of criminal activity, it would change overnight, but nobody wants a real challenge so they don't.
the police aren't skipping these procedures
The courts are not in a place to invalidate existing laws, so the legislatures are required to change those laws.
Or a clarifying constitutional amendment is required.
If you can think of a shortcut nobody else thought of then go for it.
Unions the police want it to stay and they have a very strong Union. It's the other side of well coordinated collection action it can allow a very small minority to hold the rest of the people hostage.
Most discussions about reforming or ending civil asset forfeiture focus on statehouse and federal solutions, but there's nothing stopping local governments from simply reining in their law enforcement via policy direction.
SCOTUS also has taken limited action recently.
Federal courts should, and won’t.
Congress should, and won’t.
There are numerous others who should, and won’t.
We have countless examples of impenetrable injustice like this, and there isn’t any structural way to justice that’s remotely reliable or trustworthy. And it’s easy enough to respond with the glibness that others have: the reality is that the appropriate authorities are craven and the “should” is hopelessly naive.
The answer to that is one I continually find unfortunate and yet necessary. There are no heroes. No one is coming to save us but ourselves and each other. The body which will put a stop to this is us. And it won’t be done by behaving and deferring to some different part of the system that enables it.
Also, when stuff like this gets taken, part of it goes to the state, part to the county. That needs to end too. We see it over and over, take the incentive away and this stops.
How can those sheriffs and deputies look in the mirror at the end of the day?
When you use a bank account, all transactions over $10,000 are reported to the IRS.
Surely it wouldn't be illegal in any EU country that I know of (but in some countries there's a maximum allowed amount of cash you can use in any single transaction, something between EUR 1000 and 3000), but just any law enforcement would find such an amount of cash suspicious, and probably trigger an investigation.
I used to scoff at this kind of thing. But I think I’m slowly learning some of the inner mechanics of American Liberty.
It feels like it's almost illegal to own cash when I read this. Would someone please tell why? It's OK to live in a debt, probably a very high one, buying expensive things like luxury car in credit. Is it forbidden to save cash? If it's OK, then why is it suspicious to travel in a car with cash?
Get a burglar visit your home, and poof! Your savings are gone. Also, zero interest on those (admittedly less of a concern in the 2009-2022 era).
Travel with car, drop the bag somewhere, or have an accident. Poof! Money gone.
It’s just so inconvenient to move such amount of cash that I’d probably ask myself _why_ somebody would do that in 2023.
The only reason to carry this much cash across multiple state lines I can imagine is him not wanting to leave a paper trail and withdrawing large amounts outside of his home state.
Still though, Colorado has ATMs. Maybe he didn't want to leave paper trail by withdrawing large amounts on cash outside of his home-state, I dunno.
Also, marijuana still being federally illegal in 2023 is a joke.
What evidence? He said he planned to use some in Colorado, but that wouldn't necessitate $18k. I'm not sure it'd require any cash.
Personally, I'd never travel with that much cash, but I could see withdrawing that amount of cash having potential road blocks if your bank doesn't exist in the state you're traveling to.
It is not in seller's disclosure. It is not a recorded lien against the property. I did not sign a services contract with county. Most everbody pays the bill because government power.
I fail to see a difference aside from shared willingness to for random state actors to play along with that shared desire.
It said as much in the article.
Because I am a citizen of this allegedly free country and I just might want to!
I just redid my deck and fence. I paid Time+Materials. Guy brought me the materials and the receipts, I paid cash for the materials upfront. That was $35k in materials, in several $10k chunks. This happens all the time in the real world. The guy does several jobs at a time. My wife was concerned about us having that much cash in our safe. This contractor is doing it all the time probbably 5x that amount and it's all legal.
Bought several cars over the years, in cash. Why would I do a cashieres check? Who would take it except where a bank instantly validates it. Did the title transfer at the dmv, seller got cash so knew he wasn't getting screwed, DMV moved the title right there and validates it all so I knew I wasn't getting screwed. Those were $~15k each. Motorcycle? $8k cash.
18K is "shady as hell"? Might as well get rid of habeus corpus completely.
Better question is: This is fucking America, where by all accounts money is speech. Why the fuck is anyone taking someone's property without due process in violation of the Fifth Amendment?
Because we live in a free country, and we ostensibly get to be "shady as hell" but still be left alone.
This raises the question: why drive a valuable car? Two things can be true at the same time: cops should not be seizing cars from folks on the side of the road without clear evidence of a crime, and it looks shady as hell if you are traveling in an $18k+ car.
My landlord just got hit head-on by a drunk driver and had to refuse an ambulance because he had a stack of rent cash in his truck and was too worried about it.
Almost all civil in rem forfeiture cases never go to court because they start with a civil process that requires the claimant to file a bunch of complicated paperwork just to initiate the court process to dispute the forfeiture. Then they have to go to court, usually for months or years, to fight the forfeiture, where the prosecutors are going to try to drown you in discovery procedures and interrogatories and requests to admit that any normal person is not going to comprehend without paying tens of thousands to a lawyer to deal with. Checkmate.
I beat one of these on my own, and I spent probably 100 hours in court watching thousands of cases and got to learn a whole lot about how these work. The prosecutors would regularly lie to me and tell me the judge wasn't coming when I would turn up to court and I would sign a waiver for a continuance until I figured out their tricks. In the end I would sit in the court and help people negotiate settlements, which really made the prosecutors mad. I had figured out that the prosecution would settle most cases by giving 80% of the money back to avoid trial. In my own case they filed the forfeiture in the wrong county and so they lacked jurisdiction "ab initio" as they say in Rome.
So I went to an ATM that belonged to a local credit union and I withdrew 5 $20 bills. Then I popped into a pharmacy, where I was a regular customer and the workers knew me, and I requested that they break the $20 while I purchased some candy or something inexpensive.
The pharmacy technician looked suspiciously at the bill I gave him, turned it around in the light, asked a coworker what he thought, and he handed it back to me, saying, "This is counterfeit money. We can't accept it."
A bit more context: this pharmacy was at a very busy crossroads of tourism, college students, and rambunctious homeless people.
So I slightly freaked out but I promptly reached into my wallet and pulled out a second $20 and said "here, how about this one?" and each bill was roundly rejected in turn. They didn't say why or point out the deficiencies on them, they just flat refused to accept them as legal tender.
So I got out of there and I took my wallet full of funny-money directly to my credit union. Hey, what do you do when you've just been caught passing $100 in counterfeit currency? You stick your neck out and try to get arrested or something?
So I approached the teller window and I showed them the money, and explained how it was rejected. And the banker started examining it, and called over a second guy to check it out, and they scoffed and they said it's all real, don't worry about it. And then we had an interesting conversation about what a retail worker is really supposed to do when presented with counterfeit money.
Of course I learned my lesson that day, and I was very silly to ever doubt the authenticity of the money. I am fairly well-versed in the common security features of American money, and I could tell just by look and feel that they were all present on these bills, so if they had been counterfeit, they were really, really good!