An End to Federal Plunderiug?
Bovard, James
zalong, and no one has kowtowed to them more brazenly than John McCain. If the senator is as principled as he constantly tells us, why not summon the publisher of the New York Times and the network...
...If the senator is as principled as he constantly tells us, why not summon the publisher of the New York Times and the network bosses to testify on Capitol Hill, inquire how much they spend on political coverage, and suggest that they be subjected to expenditure limits under the law just like everyone else...
...a search revealed that he actually had almost $120,000...
...It's a heck of an idea...
...At Houston International Airport, 100,813 passengers were searched in 1998, though customs inspectors were able to find pretexts to strip only eight people of their cash, including a Mexican mother with a baby and $18,924...
...Castro was sentenced to two years probation and fined $2,500...
...When the Feds arrest your property, innocence is no defense BY JAMES BOVARD Seizure fever continues to infect law enforcement across the nation...
...Preponderance of evidence," the civil standard, means essentially that the government must show that there is a 51 percent chance that property was wrongfully used...
...The owner's attempts to get his property back are then waged not under criminal rules, but under civil or even administrative procedure dauntingly favorable to the government...
...The vast majority of people whose property is seized by federal agents are never formally charged with a crime...
...Customs' response to the Court...
...That would get their attention, and ours...
...After Castro's conviction and sentencing, the government undertook a civil action to confiscate Castro's cash, though A citizen filing an allegedly frivolous suit to recover his own property can face three years in federal prison...
...In addition, the person faces several years in federal prison for lying to a federal agent...
...The crime in question "was solely a reporting offense...
...If the person does not answer honestly, the agents routinely seize the person's money...
...The new law further intimidates challenges by imposing a requirement that citizens who file suit to recover their property must 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 swear their claim is not "frivolous...
...In other words, after the government had already tacitly admitted there was no basis for the seizure...
...Many states and localities already have laws authorizing police to confiscate the autos of people accused of drunk driving— regardless of whether a person is convicted of the offense...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ April 2001 13 from forfeitures...
...Law enforcement agencies routinely keep seized assets for their own uses—one of the most brazen con-flict-of-interests around...
...Customs officials use the threat of prison to persuade many people to forgo challenges to the seizure...
...A good place to start would be the Customs Service, which scorns a Supreme Court ruling that sought to limit their power to plunder travelers...
...It is time for the creative faction in American society, otherwise known as the top one percent, to reach a similar conclusion about the charge that unlimited citizen donations would allow them to buy elections...
...Forfeiture policies continue to be a grave blot on the integrity and credibility of the federal government...
...Under the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, federal agents continue to have the power to confiscate citizens' assets without a court order and with no proof of criminal wrongdoing...
...In April 1999, Customs Chief Ray Kelly bragged to Congress: "Outbound currency seizures experienced a 59 percent increase in the $2,000 with him...
...Federal agents continue to use this pretext to seize cash despite numerous court rulings that the method is both unsound and unjust...
...With accelerating forfeiture cases a national scandal at least since the early 1990s, Congress last April finally passed a law purporting to curb some of the worst abuses...
...Moynihan accused the Reagan administration of deliberately lofting the deficit to push down spending, it occurred to many Reaganites that he had a heck of an idea...
...renowned for his tendency to kowtow to law enforcement, the new law in some ways tilts the playing field even further against innocent citizens...
...The greatest failing of last year's forfeiture reform act was that it did nothing to curb law-enforcement profiteering "I find you up in the middle of the winter and you tell me nothing's wrong...
...Any citizen who files an allegedly frivolous suit can face three years in prison simply for filing it...
...TAS An End to Federal Plundering...
...Thomas also noted that the forfeiture of the cash "bears no correlation to any injury suffered by the government...
...Federal agents merely need to claim "probable cause"—including rumor or hearsay evidence—before confiscating property...
...Customs agents pick out individuals heading for international flights or bus trips and ask them if they are carrying more than $10,000 in cash...
...Thomas declared that "a punitive forfeiture violates the Excessive Fines Clause if it is grossly disproportional to the gravity of a defendant's offense...
...But federal law, based on common law precedents reaching back to medieval England, holds that when property suspected of use in a crime is seized, the action amounts not to a criminal punishment of the owner— which would require a trial on the reasonable doubt standard—but to an arrest of the property itself, which enjoys no such protection...
...Twenty years ago, when Sen...
...In Minnesota, police confiscated a $40,000 sports utility vehicle because the owner was sitting in the driveway testing the new vehicle's audio system after he got liquored up...
...Will the Bush administration make federal agencies obey the law on forfeiture...
...In 1998, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a 5-4 majority, struck down the Customs Service's confiscation of $357,144 from a Syrian immigrant who was searched at Los Angeles International prior to heading back to Syria...
...The Justice Department confiscated 42,454 cars, boats, houses, stacks of cash, and other items of private property in 1998—booty valued at $604,514,733...
...The money consisted of profits from his two gas stations and loan repayments for Syrian relatives...
...Last August, the Albuquerque City Council passed a new ordinance empowering the police to confiscate houses where they catch 20-year-olds drinking beer...
...Authored by House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde (R-111...
...Criminal charges against persons require proof beyond reasonable doubt...
...But the government's ever-expanding involvement in the life of the nation justifies a defensive response by the taxed and the regulated...
...How is that possible...
...currency has sufficient cocaine or other narcotics residue to trigger a positive alert from a drug-sniffing dog, according to numerous federal court cases...
...Castro had by then been through a full criminal trial and sentencing procedure...
...The maximum fine under federal sentencing guidelines was $5,000...
...Be brave, John...
...There is no more common refrain in Washington than "there's too much money in politics...
...Both a federal district court and an appeals court concluded that the money had been honestly acquired and ordered most of it returned to the man...
...The Feds apparently took another blow in court on January 17 when federal judge Charles Sifton ruled that the federal government could seize cash in a civil proceeding after it failed to challenge a finding by the court probation department that the money was lawfully acquired...
...Roughly 70 percent of all U.S...
...Customs Service...
...amount of currency seized compared to the same time period in FY 1997...
...If the Bush administration wants to set a loftier tone in Washington, ending forfeiture abuses is one of the best places to start...
...Some ninety percent never get their property back...
...It sharply escalated its efforts to confiscate travelers' cash, launching a crackdown called Operation Buckstop...
...The case involved Cesar Castro, who was arrested after he told a Customs agent at JFK International that he had no evidence had ever been offered that Castro's money had any illegal taint...
...Only if some citizen challenges the seizure must the government show by a "preponderance of evidence" that the seizure was justified...
...Federal agents suffer no penalties for frivolous seizures of private property...
...Federal agents can seize a person's house, car, boat, or other property by invoking more than two hundred different federal statutes involving everything from wildlife to carrying cash out of the country to playing poker for cash with friends and relatives...
...The 1970 Bank Secrecy Act made it a federal crime for anyone to exit or enter the United States with more than $10,000 in cash without filing a report with the U.S...
...Yet the Wayne County, Michigan police department confiscates the cash that people bring in to bail out friends or relatives after dogs predictably alert—thus making it easy for police to pad their own coffers...
...the "punishment" for such behavior has in the past been outstanding performance evaluations...
...Steve Kessler, Castro's lawyer and one of the nation's foremost experts on forfeiture, told the New York Law Journal that "the government has brought hundreds of forfeiture cases after acquiescing to findings in pre-sentencing reports that the seized cash was unconnected to any criminal activity...
...Since the vast majority of seizures are not challenged—tangling with federal prosecutors is costly and beyond the skills of the sorts of lawyers available to most victimized property owners—the new standard of evidence means little or nothing to most forfeiture victims...
...Free-spending, citizen-funded, big-budget elections would decrease the relative power of the press and PACs (which ought to be eliminated anyway) and the advantages of incumbency, all of which tend to favor taxers, spenders, and regulators...
Vol. 34 • April 2001 • No. 3
