Indiana police are seizing FedEx packages containing cash
indystar.com
indystar.com
The hardships deodands often imposed seem more than faintly familiar, too. Deodands required forfeiture regardless of the fault of the owner, himself sometimes the deceased. Not infrequently, the practice left impoverished families without the means to support themselves, faced not only with the loss of a loved one but also with the loss of a horse or perhaps a cart essential to their livelihoods. Sometimes grieving families could persuade authorities or juries to forgo a deodand, but often not, and generally the burden to avoid a deodand was on them.
As time went on, too, curiously familiar financial incentives wormed their way into the system. Originally, the Crown was supposed to pass the deodand (literally, a thing given to God) onto the church 'as an expiation for the sou[l]' of the deceased. Over time, though, the Crown increasingly chose instead to sell off its rights to deodands to local lords and others. These recipients inevitably wound up with a strong interest in the perpetuation of the enterprise. Ultimately, the deodand’s appeal faded in England, and this Court has held that it 'did not become part of the common-law tradition of this country.' But has something not wholly unlike it gradually reemerged in our own lifetimes? [1]"
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-585_k5fm.pdf Gorsuch's concurrence, beginning on page 18
Bank receipts, specifically don't help.
Plenty of cases where random traffic stops and airport "additional screening" checks have resulted in cash being seized, even when someone has sufficient evidence that they withdrew it from a bank.
In Civil Asset Forfeiture cases the burden of proof is reversed (i.e the cash is presumed guilty).
Simply having a bank receipt doesn't prove innocence of the cash, and the law enforcement officers who seize it will just do so and claim that you were about to do something criminal with it.
It's on you to prove - in court, by filing a lawsuit - how you came by it, how it was to be used in legitimate activity. Even then, if you 100% prevail, you're still liable for all of your costs for doing this.
If you had to file a Federal case (because local/state authorities can, and will, send it to some federal agency and get 80% of it back in a sharing-arrangement) then your costs for getting your money back are increased even further.
> Also, having $50k on you with a bank receipt is generally a non-issue.
You have personal experience? The whole issue of Asset Forfeiture surrounds non-drug-dealing persons regularly having their cash seized under the assumption that they must be drug dealers while skipping the inconvenient step of pressing charges.
"A 2020 study found that the median cash forfeiture in 21 states which track such data was $1,300."[2]
[0] https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/shared/CTRPamphle...
[1] https://www.wunc.org/news/2021-06-15/asset-forfeiture-create...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
Coming directly out of a bank (and hence tracked by the gov’t already) is a legitimate source.
If you have a receipt showing you just withdrew it from a bank account, even if they’re stupid enough to seize it, the court is going to give it right back to you - along with a civil settlement.
This isn't true. You'll probably get the money back, but it will take a couple months and cost a couple thousand in attorney's fees (which the courts will not reimburse)
Unless you get a lot of press, and/or have someone like the Institute for Justice fighting on your behalf, that's not a given.
There's a playbook that local/state and federal agencies have.
If a local/state agency seizes your cash, then they can just kick it up to the feds. Then any suit you file will have to be against the federal government. This increases your costs and difficulty.
The local/state agency is fine with this, because they have an agreement (see "Equitable Sharing"[1]) to get 80% of the money back.
[1] https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/
Civil penalties for this behavior means if you prevail (and it’s an egregious case), you can more than make up for it. Many attorneys will take such cases on contingency, as the odds are pretty good.
Here is the federal manual on asset seizure btw [https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-afmls/file/839521/...]
what this means is that the government steals your money and then the lawyer gets half of it if you win and get it back.
(See https://ij.org/press-release/federal-government-will-return-...)
Civil Asset Forfeiture in the US is so widespread, and so egregious because it's so difficult to fight.
You can't recover your expenses in fighting it, so it's only services like IJ that will take this on without you paying for it yourself.
Sounds like a hassle.
>...On his drive from Texas to California, a Nevada Highway Patrol officer engineered a reason to pull him over, saying that he passed too closely to a tanker truck. The officer who pulled Stephen over complimented his driving but nevertheless prolonged the stop and asked a series of questions about Stephen’s life and travels. Stephen told the officer that his life savings was in the trunk. Another group of officers arrived, and Stephen gave them permission to search his car. They found a backpack with Stephen’s money, just where he said it would be, along with receipts showing all his bank withdrawals. After a debate amongst the officers, which was recorded on body camera footage, they decided to seize his life savings.
Well they must really believe they have a strong case then, right?
>...So Stephen teamed up with the Institute for Justice to get his money back. It was only after IJ brought a lawsuit against the DEA to return Stephen’s money, and his story garnered national press attention, that the federal government agreed to return his money. In fact, they did so just a day after he filed his lawsuit, showing that they had no basis to hold it.
Nope, I guess they knew they didn't have a case. To recap: They engineer a fake reason for a traffic stop treating cars as a potential lottery ticket with a big payoff. They take the money even though they know they shouldn't. They circumvent Nevada law by handing the money to the DEA so they could get a kickback, hoping he won't be able to now afford a lawyer since they took his life savings. The minute he shows he has a powerful legal team looking into the case, they hand back the money.
https://ij.org/case/nevada-civil-forfeiture/
>For civil asset forfeiture the whole premise is that you can't prove the money is your's.
Also, one has to wonder why the basic principle of the state having to prove guilt needs to be upended with civil asset forfeiture. If you are alleged to have murdered someone you are assumed innocent, but for civil asset forfeiture you are assumed guilty?
This is civil vs criminal law. In civil cases you do not have the right to an attorney and hearing can be ex parte. The burden of proof is only more likely than not. So you have one-sided cases with no representation for the asset. These same lack of protections are being exploited for things like red flag laws, proposed abortion laws, etc. It's the same sloppy paradigm - too much work to do things under criminal law due to pesky rights, so just move it to the civil side.
We'll assume for a second this was purely state to state (ie no customs involved) since that seems to be the case.
Even then, they generally don't get involved unless a package smells funny, is leaking, or making noise.
But if it does, it may get opened or dog sniffed or inspected (fedex itself generally does not open packages, they would set them aside. Chain of custody and all that. While they probably reserve the right to open whatever, the in-practice exceptions mostly about trying to find a receiver when the label/other identifying info is destroyed somehow.).
There are also some amount of random checks.
But to put this in perspective (and again, i think civil forfeiture is nutso), thi is is a fedex site that processes about 100k packages an hour.
The state seized 134 packages in the past year.
If they were inspecting any meaningful percent of packages, this would probably be 100x greater.
Welcome to the slippery slope of the “reasonable expectation of privacy”
I’ll see you at the bottom, we are going there fast
Minor correction, but the article says they can process up to 99k packages per hour.
At 1000/hour it means they did 9 million packages a year and seized .001 percent of them (think I got that right, on my phone)
FedEx does 15 million packages a day (2.8 billion a year) overall and this is the second largest hub. So the number is probably much closer to 100k an hour than 1000/hour.
FedEx is expanding capacity to 140k/hour as well
1. If property is confiscated as part of punishment for a crime (e.g. places that make you forfeit your car if you get a DUI), then it is subject to the 8th amendment.
2. If the property itself is suspected of being a criminal tool (e.g. money earned illegally), then it is not.
3. Since in #2, it is a civil case against property (rather than a criminal case against a person), the property has no right to an attorney, and the burden of proof is merely "preponderance of the evidence" (i.e. neither side is privileged for evidence). There are also other more lenient due-process rules compared to a criminal case.
So, for example, in a criminal case if the government's entire case is "this looks suspicious" then the defense can be "you haven't proved anything" but in a civil case, the defense would have to offer enough evidence to outweigh the suspicion. And since there is no right to representation, the defendant has to find and pay for their own lawyer.
The IJ does some amazing work. Highly recommend supporting them if their mission resonates with you. I always find something refreshing and uplifting in the bimonthly print magazine.
EDIT: I cannot reply to metabagel's comment (due to it being flagged?) about IJ being "right wing" but here is a smattering of recent cases[2]:
Institute for Justice Files Lawsuit Challenging Florida’s Ban on Cultivated Meat https://ij.org/case/florida-cultivated-meat-ban/
Courts Say City Owes Her Over $200,000; But Now She Has to Sue Again to Get Paid https://ij.org/case/oklahoma-takings/
New petition asks Supreme Court to let woman’s suit against her abuser’s enabler move forward after nearly a decade in court. https://ij.org/case/martinez-v-high/
Lawsuit Seeks Accountability for Unconstitutional Raid of a Political Opponent’s Home. https://ij.org/case/marion-kansas-retaliation/
Virginia Woman Challenges Permanent Punishment Preventing Her from Working as a Substance Abuse Counselor https://ij.org/case/virginia-fresh-start-2/
Family seeks to hold officer accountable after he led SWAT raid at wrong house https://ij.org/case/texas-wrong-house-raid/
[1] https://ij.org/
Why is this downvoted and flagged? I didn’t say they are extreme right, but they clearly support conservative causes, including school vouchers. Am I wrong?
They oppose government licensing. They stand up for the little guy against the government, but not against big corporations.
I’m just saying, be aware what their agenda is before you sign on.
And yes, in this case I absolutely agree with them. But, I wouldn’t support a lot of what they do.
That description sounds more libertarian than right or left.
Because that's literally not their mission: https://ij.org/about-us/
"Our mission is to end widespread abuses of government power ..."
"IJ is the national civil liberties law firm that represents everyday people—free of charge—when the government violates their most important constitutional rights. ..."
The fact that they choose to deal with government abuse of power and not corporate abuse of power seems totally reasonable and unrelated to left or right or whatever. I would not call them right wing simply because they have chosen to focus - all successful non-profit civil liberties law firms do this. Anything else is insane/impossible.
I'm not sure why you are choosing to paint them with a left or right brush here, when it seems mainly complaining that their mission doesn't match what you seem to want.
Most of the civil rights orgs that spend time dealing with corporate abuse of power either ignore or don't take government abuse of power cases. I don't think that classifies them as "left wing" or "right wing" either. It's just pragmatic for what they can accomplish.
And again, I think it's great that they took this case, because it's egregious. But, I just don't support their broader agenda.
Care to provide some kind of citations?
That’s part of what facilitated the political rotation where left and right populists formed the Unity Party (Trump, Kennedy, Gabbard, et al), while classic statists such as Cheney and Clinton allied into the Uniparty.
They usually define themselves as a libertarian organization which seems a much more accurate way of describing them.
>...they clearly support conservative causes,
"Liberals" don't support ending qualified immunity? Reforming laws that prevent convicts from being able to get a job is a "conservative" cause? etc. It wouldn't surprise me that some people who consider themselves conservative would disagree with and other cases that some people who consider themselves liberal would disagree with.
On their web site they say "Our mission is to end widespread abuses of government power and secure the constitutional rights that allow all Americans to pursue their dreams."
Agreed. IJ (Institute for Justice) [0] and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) [1] are my two favorite organizations when it comes to doing the hard work to protect our constitutional rights as Americans!
[0]: https://ij.org
Their initial statement on pro-Palestine protests was disgraceful.
Their ranking of best colleges in the country for free speech are completely wrong (and just happen to align with the political views of their big donors).
For example one factor is how many newspaper articles get written about issues with free speech at a school. Tiny private colleges that explicitly say they don't support free speech do great on this metric.
University of Virginia is championed by them as the best school in the country for free speech, which simply isn't true.
(Round 2, donating to candidates via cash the cops steal, is more tricky to set up since you'd need separate donor-candidate pairs across the partisan spectrum to make it work well.)
Gorsuch and Thomas's concurring opinion in Culley [1] all but tips the Court's hand. (Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson dissent more strongly.)
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-585_k5fm.pdf page 18
I use cash to do things I don't want traced to me, that's the point. Many communities live at the fringe or beyond of what society deems acceptable and cash is a great tool for those communities to do their thing.
Civil asset forfeiture is an attack on marginalized people.
You ever wondered why, you can't ship cape products through USPS for example due to an executive order, but UPS and FedEx also won't let you do it? Did you know that they created that rule the same moment the executive order was signed, independently? Strange world we live in.
We all should just be good Americans and let them “seize” whatever they want!
--
Then it requires the feds themselves to interfere to open the package. Plus, Registered Mail has a full chain of custody as the item becomes a fully accountable item within the mail stream that is signed for at every single touch along the way.
Mostly I was shocked/amused at the juxtaposition of apparent opinions. "Cops are abusing people? Well what about about the employers abusing people?" is just a weird stance to take?
> Mostly I was shocked/amused at the juxtaposition of apparent opinions. "Cops are abusing people? Well what about about the employers abusing people?" is just a weird stance to take?
Why?
People are quick to forget that the morality of any given action should always be judged by its legality in any random jurisdiction.
But that ends the moment someone says it's theirs, or there are records pointing to an owner who isn't actively hiding from you. This whole modern "prove where you got it from" bs is just theft.
Inflation is a constant.
(And to pre-add, precious metals haven't historically been a great hedge either, when benchmarked against investing in economic growth)
Having spare cash around is never a bad idea. But there are precious few timelines in which the banking system collapses so completely that savings are inaccessible for extended periods (or at all) but paper U.S. dollars continue to hold value.
Genuinely curious for a single example of a collapsing country's fiat currency being useful for extradition.
If this is actually your fail case, hold foreign currency.
Not really. If U.S. cash is useful, so are dollars in a bank. Not in the very short term. But over a timeline of more than a week.
Storing tens of thousands of dollars of cash for an emergency is stupid, because almost every emergency that takes out the banking system renders that currency worthless. You’re better off having hard supplies or forex you can trade for exfiltration.
This is a strong assumption. So far I've experienced three cases of loosing access to my money in the bank for various reasons and I also witnessed one more case with my parents 25 years ago. In all four cases the cash was still useful, losing between 0% and 70% of the value.
None of that was in US of course, but I still think that your range of scenarios is too narrow.
If you want to have a reserve for a case when things go badly wrong, banks all go under, government can't bail them out, etc, then park some of your cash in yuan and rupee, in a piece of overseas realty, in gold bullion, and don't forget to invest in medical supplies, shells, and other such gear.
Different views of the future risks drive different decisions.
Getting taxed multiple times isn't necessarily bad, it's the overall burden (and deadweight loss!) that matters.
In any case, you could try moving to a lower tax jurisdiction? (And giving up your American passport, if you have any.)
* Nobody with a clue. Petty criminals do sometimes turn up at police stations looking for lost property of this kind and are then surprised to be arrested.
There is a parallel situation with the No Fly List, which is clearly unconstitutional in many cases but the Federal government is adroit at making sure no case with standing makes it to the USSC to be adjudicated, lest they lose this particular weapon.
And how is this ongoing? Have they just not yet encountered someone with the means (and strong enough case) to fight it tooth and nail up the courts?
The language is from Culley, which was decided last year [1]. I haven't seen any evidence that anyone is deflecting cases. Just that our judicial system is slow.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-585_k5fm.pdf
How long will it take the Federal Circuit to overrule this inexplicable nonsense? The novice reader may find that question to be ignorant, since the Supreme Court is the highest court of the United States. Those well acquainted with the industry know that the Supreme Court is not the final word on patentability, and while the claims at issue in this particular case are unfortunately lost, the Federal Circuit will work to moderate (and eventually overturn) this embarrassing display by the Supreme Court. This will eventually be accomplished the same as it was after the Supreme Court definitively ruled software is not patentable in Gottschalk v. Benson, and the same as the ruling in KSR v. Teleflex will be overruled. I have taken issue with Chief Judge Rader’s statements that nothing has changed in Federal Circuit jurisprudence as a result of KSR, which is not technically true. What is true, however, is that the Federal Circuit continues to refine the KSR “common sense test,” narrowing the applicability in case after case and tightening the ability for “common sense” to be used against an application. We are almost 5 years post KSR and there is still a lot of work left to be done by the Federal Circuit to finally overrule the Supreme Court’s KSR decision. It took almost 10 years to overrule Gottschalk v. Benson, so we are likely in for a decade of work to moderate the nonsense thrust upon the industry this morning.
It's a state sanctioned violent gang that also happens to be completely immune from any sort of responsibility.
Totally different things.
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/meet-currency-detecto...
During a three-week period, fishermen fooled the Nazis and police dogs who
searched their ships – lacing handkerchiefs with a mixture of rabbit blood and
cocaine, in order to fool the dogs.
From the concept of "they'll only do that once, and probably be useless the rest of the day". ;)
"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."
I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/golden-valleys-new-k-...
[1] https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/meet-currency-detecto...
[2] https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/canine-...
Yes, dogs give you a convenient excuse to produce 'probable cause' in order to authorise a search whenever you feel like it, because the signs the dogs give are interpreted by their handlers.
So it's not necessarily so much security theatre, as perhaps 'whitewashing' of evidence obtained in other ways. see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
That said, no one on the Internet knows that I am a dog.
Well, then I guess the handler can usually find probable cause!
Not necessarily if the experiment is double blind. (Or tripple blind I guess because it is the dog, the handler and the on-site experimenter who are not aware of where the samples are hidden.)
> Can't win against crooks.
That is the bigger problem.
How is the boot tasting this morning?
During this time someone could have similarly proved that it wasn't so because were it so surely someone could have challenged it.
An alternative explanation is that forensic science or indeed any sort of science as practiced by law enforcement has always been a joke and the bar to do something about it is always very very high.
The cost of challenging anything is often prohibitively expensive both in terms of legal costs and in risk of drawing a sentence several times worse than a plea and any case which might result in police losing a valuable tool can be mooted by simply dropping that particular case after that high bar is met.
Remember also that the prosecution and the judge aren't scientists but ARE colleagues. Perceptively evidence from dogs are brought only when they actually find something so even if they don't provably always "work" in the scientific sense they perceptively help them nail bad guys. The idea that the judge would be liable to remove that useful tool because it didn't pass scientific muster is both optimistic and naive.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-mic...
"To test this, we influenced handler beliefs and evaluated subsequent handler/dog team performance according to handler-identified alerts. The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance."
Police science is a parallel world of non-science. Over and over, fake science like hair id, bite mark analysis, fire, shaken baby, excited delirium, and others are debunked. But the courts have been terribly uninterested in hearing science contradict police-science.
"Nice." — LVPD, probably.
But when I point that out I'm the delusional extremist.
You can disagree with civil forfeiture while agreeing with taxation, but not with general complaints about a state sanctioned violent gang stealing from the populace.
Taxes are impersonal. The rules apply to "everyone" [1]. They are written up, voted on (by congress) and so on.
Civil forfeiture is a random event made by a random cop on a targeted individual. It is the very definition of unfair.
Equally you can define taxation as "stealing" hut it's really not. (CF is stealing in my book). It was different in the past, but today taxation is used to pay for things - it doesn't just go to the bank account of a person.
-some- govt and govt services are necessary for society to function. (A quick look at places without govt demonstrate that.) And yes, one can argue about the priority of one service over another. But fundamentally govt serves the society and taxes is just the way that gets paid for.
The scale, priorities, spending of govt is obviously up for debate, but funding it is necessary, and so I don't consider taxes to be theft.
Incidentally, if you feel that all govt is bad and we should exist without one I recommend trying to live in a place where the govt is non-functioning. Thats when you discover where all that spending goes and what it achieves.
[1] for some definition of "everyone" - the system has flaws.
"It's hard to empathize with the people engaging in homosexuality. It's an inherently careless and risky thing to do, and meeting up in gay-friendly districts is very obviously (and ironically) done to avoid public decency orders and legitimate family formation."
A man ahead of his time, if you ask me. We need to ensure that those who fail to lick the boot hard enough should be separated from their tongues.
Suspected of criminal activity due to "money existing".
It should be a very simple procedure.
I have no issue with the seizure itself. What should come next is the police ask the person or business to explain it. They show an invoice / receipt, and the money is logged and returned promptly.
There is so much weird hate for the government in the comments, but please provide a single sane scenario where you need to send cash instead of a bank transfer that is not about avoiding laws/taxes.
There are NONE. You send the cash because you did something against the law.
So by all means, the police should keep the money until you simple prove the non-existing totally legit reason why you could not use a bank transfer. I understand the problem with this, but you don´t prove that you are innocent; but large amounts of cash are usually connected to crime and it is your job to explain why not.
The United States is NOT every country. We have a Constitution that makes this behavior unacceptable.
> So by all means, the police should keep the money until you simple prove the non-existing totally legit reason why you could not use a bank transfer. I understand the problem with this, but you don´t prove that you are innocent; but large amounts of cash are usually connected to crime and it is your job to explain why not.
Once again, I’m not sure where you’re from, but here in America, we’re innocent until proven guilty, and that’s a pretty big deal. Also, the burden of proof is on law enforcement to prove that a citizen is guilty of a crime, not on the citizen to prove that they’re innocent.
Legally, it’s entirely irrelevant that you or anyone in law enforcement believe it to be strange that someone is either carrying large amounts of cash or sending cash via mail—it’s perfectly legal behavior.
My grandma has never ever put a single dollar in the bank, because she doesn’t trust them. I don’t have her experience, but she should be able to do as she pleases with her cash without law enforcement treating her as a criminal just so they can steal her money. It’s that simple.
> large amounts of cash are usually connected to crime
Do you have a source for that assertion?
What if I really want this Chevy Suburban for $11,950 where the seller is strictly saying 'cash only'? Sure maybe buying that particular vehicle with a quarter million miles on it doesn't qualify as "sane", but it doesn't appear to be illegal.
https://austin.craigslist.org/cto/d/houston-2018-chevy-subur...
According to whom? Most of us living in western (and purportedly freedom-respecting) countries are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent.
It's undemocratic and frankly vile to openly support violation of our constitutional rights like this, instead of campaigning for laws to be changed if you disagree with them.
Someone (I'm assuming it's only one person) must have gotten a downvote and now has spun up a bunch of new accounts to complain about bot armies and astroturfing.
Moreover, they're complaining that the tone here is too pro-police, despite what I see is a majority of comments being critical of asset forfeiture.
The feds do quite a lot these days that isn't actually part of their enumerated powers.
The plaintiff "is pursuing a class action lawsuit against the state of Indiana." No evidence of any Feds being involved.
The law, not the Constitution. Nothing in the Constitution would prevent the Congress from banning mailing cash.
> These attempts at limiting the content of the mail were upheld by the Supreme Court, but in the 20th century, the Court took a more assertive approach in striking down postal laws which limited free expression, particularly as it related to political materials.[7][8] The First Amendment thus provided a check on the Postal Power.
And SCOTUS these days also tends to equate cash as a form of political speech. Of course mailing cash is a bit different than mailing political materials but you could make the case that it’s part of a political organizing campaign or payment for political materials. And mailing cash itself through the USPS is actually perfectly legal as long as it’s for a legal purpose.
No, it does not.
Donating to a candidate or sponsoring an ad that says things about a candidate are protected political speech, requiring a strict standard for the Congress to regulate. Citizens reasoned that if that’s true individually it should be true for a group, on the basis—in part—of freedom of assembly, whether that be an advocacy group or corporation.
Money = speech is a colloquial but wrong summary. Money donated to a candidate or used to buy speech is protected, whether done individually or as a group. The simplest resolution is to read the opinion.
(Logically speaking, it makes sense. It’s just absurd to construct the freedom of assembly as automatically making all rights natural persons enjoy commutative.)
Take what i'm about to say as a description of the process rather than any support for it :)
So, it's not quite that. Here, they are claiming it because a dog "alerted" on the package, so they then claim it's related to criminal activity. regardless of whether they find actual drugs in it.
This part: "Even though Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department dogs alerted handlers to the smell of drugs in the box, no contraband could be found once it was opened."
The first part is why they were involved and allowed to seize it.
The second is mostly irrelevant, legally (whether it should be or not). You don't have to prove it contained drugs to prove it was proceeds of a crime or otherwise part of criminal activity. This part is actually right, whether it gets used in an insane fashion or not. This is civil and not criminal, so the standard is not "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
They file a suit against the money itself. It ends up with a funny case title like "United States v. An Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls," or "United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins"
(both real, but federal seizures. If a state seizes it, it's like State of Indiana v., and often less funny)
Even if the person is not charged with a crime, if they successfully argue the money itself is criminal proceeds or was involved in criminal activity, they can confiscate it.
So, it's not sending cash that enables them to seize it. It's whether the money is used in criminal activity. The thing that enables them to be involved is that the dog alerted to it.
Now, for as much bullshit as exists in dog alerts, in this case, fedex often goes through about 100k packages an hour in this site, and they have seized 100 of them in the past year.
That's a really really small percent of the packages.
Such a vanishingly small percentage that it suggests some sort of parallel construction. Surely the dog (and handler) aren't just standing there all year waiting to hit on a package..
So my guess - they set aside the very small percent of very funny smelling or leaking or ... packages (since lots of packages never see human hands, it would be a very small percent anyway) and then the police dogs sniff them.
If i remember, i'll see if i can find some earlier docketed cases and see if they describe whether they have police there all the time or not. I honestly would not be shocked.
I live near a mcmaster carr warehouse that is about a million square feet (one of their larger ones), and they have local k-9 police out front 24/7 just sitting in their car near the entrance to the facility (AFAICT - they have been there every time i have ever done will-call, and when i asked the guy, he said they were there 24/7)
It would not surprise me that fedex's indy hub (which is 2.4 million square feet, and more important than this mcmaster carr warehouse) had local police k-9 units around 24/7.
Last but definitely not least, the indy hub is, IIRC, at the indianapolis airport. In that case, there would definitely be k-9 units and local police just hanging around.
United States v. an Art. Consisting of Boxes of Clacker Balls, 413 F. Supp. 1281 (E.D. Wis. 1976)
Having said all that, sending cash through the mail just feels like a really obvious money laundering vector. You might claim that there's no distinction between that and, say, handing over a bunch of cash directly to a person, but in the world of money laundering each extra layer makes the operation safer!
I don't think that from this it follows that we should be opening envelopes all over, but there's a universe where the seller of jewelry is very aware that they are taken illicit cash, and in a a more just universe there's some sort of warrant.
I do not know how to square the privacy question with this, but I do like the idea of money laundering not being trivially doable.
Money laundering is trivial regardless.
This cash thing is messy enough, but the drug sniffing dogs at the FedEx distribution center is obviously _something_. Even if the dog was consistently finding drugs in packages (and not being an excuse to open a package), is that OK? Is that not? What if LE is X-Ray'ing packages for "safety" reasons, do they get carte blanche to search the package there?
You might be surprised how I'd land on most of these, I think privacy is pretty important and blanket searches are pretty BS! I kinda think drug sniffing dogs are bad!
Just holistically speaking, you'd probably find that "drug sniffing dogs should not be allowed at airports and FedEx shipping centers" would be extremely unpopular and also not an easy point to argue as a consequence of some fundamental constitutional rights. And then the dogs are there, so now the cops have a skeleton key.
Context matters I guess.
That would mean, essentially, that they could not do anything at all with your packages unless they already have a reason to suspect you of a crime, and that even then, they have to have a reason to believe that a particular package is involved in said crime and even say beforehand what they expect to find in it.
Now, on to the specific scenario at hand. You might argue that that is too stringent, that no crime can ever be proven under that framework, and you may say it shouldn't preclude x rays and drug dogs and what not, I might even agree with you. But that as well as any other reasonable concept of justly handling suspicion precludes randomly opening peoples packages and keeping money by construing the simple presence of money as evidence that a crime maybe was committed and they get to keep it whether there was or wasn't a crime there. Even by the most lax framework of how to handle suspicion and searching property that is outrageous.
To be clear, I'm against what has happened in this case! But I think you'll find plenty of judges who will sign off on the idea that sending $43k through FedEx in cash to buy jewelry is plenty suspicious. Way more than a broken tail light.
You might say "how did they know it was for a jewelry purchase", but now you're arguing that looking at the destination of the package is a search. Given how courts have treated probably cause in general, you're looking at an uphill argument.
The nefarious thing here of course is that its seized so now the sender theoretically needs to come forward and prove the contrary, somehow. So much for presumption of innocence!
There is an abstract argument to be made based on what the constitution says, but if everyone in power agrees that something means what it means (despite that not agreeing with... well, the actual meaning of the words), you kind of have to argue in that framework. And while civil forefeiture as a whole feels like a pretty big and juicy target for some argument, this very focused case doesn't fall apart that easily IMO.
If you are buying into reasonable suspicion as a means for law enforcement to do things, and you have the dogs, I don't know how you avoid that leading to "the money in the envelope here is seizable". This case is way less sympathetic than the usual "someone gets pulled over with cash in their car and it gets seized".
So a drug sniffing dog alert being justification for a search, presumably they'd expect to find drugs upon opening the package. I think the same thing would apply here, they thought they found drugs, they didn't find drugs, so they can't do anything, let alone seize the property.
This is a classic America debate - just because criminals do it doesn't mean the State should punish everyone else that does it. America is full of weirdos that want to do weird things and be left alone to do it without State interference. Since 2001 I feel like the "if you have nothing to hide..." argument has been given WAY too much credence. Feels like the American zeitgeist is turning against characters like Hunter S. or George Carlin and I feel like we used to celebrate this sort of gonzo, leave-me-the-fuck-alone ideology instead.
I believe you have the right to privacy! I believe that searches should have warrants associated to them! The fact that a "drug sniffing dog" was how this package was opened feels like enough to just throw this out!
I do think there is a universe where this happened through a warrant, and that the warrant wasn't given out glibly, and where the seizure probably makes a hell of a lot of sense.
Context-free discussions on this are annoying because at one point the _extremely crucial distinction_ of judicial oversight through a warrant just gets completely lost despite it being _the load-bearing component_ to "not without a warrant"!
That language is being used to justify all sorts of unethical behavior by the police, often flagrantly unconstitutional, usually at minimum illegal, and almost always the times it's not obviously illegal, it should be (the laws should be changed).
I don't know if it's from lack of regular interaction from the police but I find a lot of people online are under the mistaken impression that the constitution or law is guarding the rights of people in the USA. Cops get away with violating the constitution and breaking the law multiple times every day - sometimes in ways the supreme court has allowed, such as by lying to you, or tricking you into thinking you have to voluntarily give up your rights. Combine that with a completely overwhelmed court system that leads to something like 90% of people taking plea deals, and the absurd concept of "mandated minimums" and sentencing requirements that judges blindly follow, and you've got a legal system that's nothing like what people represent online.
So I feel "well it's suspicious but of course they should get a warrant" is pro-surveillance state, not anti.
Those were sent USPS priority, and I can surely tell you there was mild panic when they didn’t show up on time. I was concerned someone saw the contents on X-ray and decided they had nothing to lose by letting that envelope, um, slip through the cracks.
They eventually arrived, but it was a worrisome couple days.