FBI seized $40k from Linda Martin without charging her with a crime
reason.com
reason.com
If you have experience of behaviour like this, I understand that leaning.
But no matter what we do this is an unsolvable problem of policing/judicial system. There will always be people who are falsely accused/falsely convicted. Let's say less than 1%, as a hypothetical. Do we accept that due to that we might be reducing crime by a lot? That's a question society has to answer.
I think the best solution here is not focusing on policing/courts, but making sure that everyone in the society is content, so that they don't commit crimes. Happy people with resources a typical human wants probably don't commit many crimes.
I don't think the police have powers here to shake down anyone in this way (imprison maybe, but not shakedown like this).
Land of the free?
ACAB, because non-bastard cops don't last long in the field. Cops that break the "thin blue line" and push back against this type of thing get ostracized.
I can see how people with little or no money could get dragged into it, their lives likely destroyed. No one really cares, which makes it even worse.
In Illinois the district attorney will send you a notice saying they have seized your property and you have 14 days to dispute it in writing by filing a specific (confusing) type of form (which they tell you they will neither provide to you or assist you in any way to complete it). If you fail to notice the form, or if you can't figure it out, or file it late, then your stuff is gone. Dead. The form just means they now have to file a suit and serve you, and now the process starts a second, more complicated road where you have to go to court, file an appearance, potentially pay a lawyer, file motions and maybe go to trial.
99% of time once it goes to court the gov will sit down and have an informal negotiation with you to pay you not to go to trial on the case. The gov attorneys I knew all had an 80% figure. They would always start by saying "Look, we'll give you half your money back right now. I'll write you a check, this matter is over, you never need to come to court again." I would tip off everyone I could that the gov would go to 80% without a fight.
I've seen some funny ones. A dope dealer. They'd taken $150K in dope money. It was definitely dope money. But here they are telling him "Look, we'll give you $90K of it back right now, straight into your bank if you drop this. We'll also try to get you a year off your sentence too."
I think at one point his attorney got a court to basically order the cops to return his assets, but the cops flat-out refused. I think that's when the cops came with the offer of about 10% of the value of the seized assets (around $50K). His attorney, a close family friend, advised him to take it.
My ex's brother was absolutely innocent. And the whole process broke him. He had to move him and his family back into his parents' house while the situation unfolded. And that's why he took his family to live in Mexico. It's such a shame, too, because last I heard he was doing really well in Mexico; he opened a bunch of automated car washes. So, it sucks that a hard-working, entrepreneurial dude like him took his talents to another country because the corrupt-ass local cops wanted free shit.
Edit: title seems to have been edited since.
> The FBI Seized Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost
I think it's decent, but still a bit ambiguous. Less ambiguous than if it just said "She Fought Back and Lost". My initial assumption formed by the title was still that she didn't get her money back.
The "lost her case" language is very much a public narrative around the court case, but from the legal perspective, her suit was dismissed for a lack of jurisdiction, which is pretty much the court refusing to consider the case.
Americans will only do the right thing after they have exhausted all other options. Slavery, women's suffrage, jim crow laws, police brutality, civil forfeiture, reproductive rights, health care...we always seem to be among the last nations on the planet to figure out how to do things correctly. It's almost like our constitution is fatally flawed and designed for oppression rather than freedom.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
If the issue is one of jurisdiction, did they file the case in the wrong court?
Following local news, I've seen the case where a case is closed because it was filed in the wrong court. A different court had jurisdiction in the matter. I wonder if that's what happened in this case.
In this case, reading the opinion w/dismissal, there were two factors involved:
1) The court determined her individual claim was moot because the FBI had already discontinued the forfeiture proceedings & returned her seized property, with interest, before the appeal
2) Her class claim was also dismissed because no class had been certified before her individual claim became moot
They also denied that she’s part of some well defined class for a class action. It’s not like they are saying there’s some other court she can go to.
US courts are generally infamous for denying justice whenever they see fit using technicalities like “standing” and other procedural grounds.
Environmental law violations, illegal surveillance programs, civil asset forfeiture like here, and constitutional violations are quite often practically impossible to get courts to address, especially if parts of the US government are the defendant.
This is how NYC dodged a Bruen type ruling for so long.
That same term in law suits is called "venue", when you've filed in the wrong county, for instance.
It takes a lot of guts, and some real resources, to fight back when the FBI violates you like this. I never even considered it after some FBI stole all my computers(*1) and then, when 10 years later they gave them back, all my bitcoin was missing (the files and OS and everything there; the wallet was just wiped and replaced w/blank one with no transactions).
ref 1. My apartment was raided and burgled by the FBI as part of a 50+ person cross-country fishing expedition warrant looking for wikileaks members to squash political dissent in 2011. I was never charged with a crime or even indicted.
If so, there are many a lawyer that would pro bono that I presume, especially with the price of bitcoin today.
As for stirring trouble again with a lawsuit: I definitely don't want saurons eye back upon me. I just can't handle that kind of stress. Even if I'm in the right and it'd be a life changing amount of money. Even posting about it here on HN makes my anxiety spike and me start sweating. Just typing this kind of thing in public is risky.
It takes a strong person to stand up to the FBI. I wish Linda Martin all the luck and support. Hopefully they don't use her fighting back as a reason to target her for more harassment.
If you obtained or spent the bitcoin with a company or person that you are still able to contact, you should be able to get an address.
One thing to bear in mind is that it could have been a contractor who worked for the FBI. Someone at an external firm hired to do the job. Or just a tech at the FBI.
The FBI would still be liable, but would also potentially point their ire at the thief and criminal who did so, under contract.
A law firm might pro-bono the detective work, to see just who spent that coin, if anyone did.
Just to be petty? Why would someone assume you didn't have a backup?
I'd guess some bug in your wallet app zeroed it out, if this even happened.
Why'd the FBI take your computers?
In practice, the Courts (supposedly sworn to uphold that Constitution) will happily accept 'most any hare-brained theory, so long is the bottom line is that the gov't and its chums are free to do as they wish unto the weak and expendable.
And this situation is nothing like unique to the past 2-3 decades. Nor to the Federal gov't. Nor to the US of A. I'd bet it was SOP in most places, back when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi was first being written down.
The money also does not go back into public service use. It's often funneled into items such as F-350 trucks for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual recent examples from Georgia).
I know wage theft is massive (world over).
The public LOVED it because it was used to nail all those drug kingpins... (remember all the ferraris and speedboats the undercover cops had on Miami Vice. It wasn't fiction)
The enablers either individually or demographically are low on the list. That's the problem, people feel justified being enablers because they rightly surmise the risk to them personally is low.
The fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
They're being sneaky and skirting around it by charging objects with crimes, but everyone knows that is such bullshit that it's the kind of stupid fuckery that would have been pulled in the Spanish Inquisition.
https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/greenwood-village-h...
There are court filings where they included seized Monero wallets, and had no idea of the balance, no idea of the how to access the wallet due to lack of password, and most importantly, no proof that the balance they THINK they seized is still there
since you can retain access in multiple ways and can move funds from that wallet, that means the FBI seized a copy of a lock where funds were ostensibly behind. But no key, and not the only lock.
You can also use Monero as an intermediary mixer to fund anonymous wallets in other currencies. Since program and smart contract platforms have so many other assets to hold, like stablecoins. The governemnt won't seize those, while the government will seize your exchange accounts and the transparent wallets you transferred to from the exchange accounts. You want to unlink your assets.
This has worked for 10 years consecutively, and Monero has increased its security and continues to as computation performance improves.
It is likely that more blockchains go opaque with opt-in transparency, as computation continues to improve.
It's not an illegal idea though, the government had no right to take it. But also what if the bank burns down, gets robbed, etc etc etc. Most security boxes aren't insured so you're screwed. And if you're paying to insure your cash, why not put it into a savings account and make the bank pay you for it.
Civil asset forfeiture should be a direct and obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, specificially "unreasonable search and seizure" but no, the law has contorted civil asset forfeiture to be OK because money is property and property has no constitutional rights.
The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property. The police as an institution began as slave catchers (ie returning slaves, being "property", to their owners). Even the FBI has its origin in the Mann Act [1], also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Basically, it was anti-misagenation.
More generally, if you look at any important course case, mainly Supreme Court precedents, just look at a decision with the lens of how the wealthy will benefit and you'll be able to prodict the outcome with at least a 90% accuracy.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if they existed to protect the inverse segment and their property?
Basically imagine police throwing in jail people who declare a plot of land as belonging to them, or someone who has seized the means of production and is now pocketing all the profits.
In a capitalist society, that's tautological. The interests of the wealthy are the interests of the state.
Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
Are you ignorant or a troll? This isn't an either/or situation of course. You could also be an ignorant troll.
I'm a significant Wikipedian, so maybe.
> Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
No. They are independent and serve different purposes. Criminal fines are meant to be taken against legally possessed assets. When someone steals $10 million dollars, the $10 million dollars is seized via civil asset forfeiture. Hence when National Propaganda Radio reports some white collar criminal was fined $10,000 dollars for stealing $10 million dollars, what they're not telling you is that the $10 million dollars is going to be seized via a civil judicial process, regardless of any criminal judicial process. Otherwise it's easy to be confused when white collar criminals almost always get fines less than they stole. All criminals would have to do is steal more than the maximum fine, and NPR happily lets massive amounts of leftists think so.
Anyone who writes things like that reveals that they are, in fact, just an ignorant troll. Thanks for confirming, I'll try to remember to ignore your comments in the future.
Ignorance is bliss, but the US is probably still better.
If so, that's absolutely wrong.
I don't know so my claim is weak, my Wikipedia articles on non-US legal systems is extremely slow going, and I have not written articles on this particular topic outside the US. :( The real basis of my claim is that most of the world would be expected to have judicial procedures for seizing assets more akin to our CAF. What the US considers reduced rights, like no jury trial, is just how things are elsewhere. (Ain't no one with a right to a jury trial anywhere in the world ever gonna choose a bench trial, it's that much of a difference.)
Preponderance (US), Balance of Probabilities (CA, UK, Ireland, SG, AU, NZ, PH, SA, NG), extinción de dominio (MX, CO, BR)?
Civil forfeiture is a hot topic all over the world. But the US has Executive forfeiture in practice.
One of the differences is that the US has PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), that in practice we have a clue. Since the 80s. It adds up.
However nothing has been done yet because it’s yet another tool used to control the population. The current powers in government and their billionaire owners do not want civil asset forfeiture to disappear.
Thus part of the reason we are stuck in this endless "culture war" when we should be aiming our frustration at the billionaire class.