Isn’t the FedEx hub private property? What are the police even doing there? Did FedEx cut a deal with the police that they could hang out there and steal shit?
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
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.