The government: Taking your business when you did nothing wrong
The Institute for Justice is on a federal forfeiture case in which a family business the feds are trying to steal because a small percentage of customers were arrested for drug crimes. Via instapundit, with more.
November 1st, 2012 at 9:40 pm
Who wants to bet some bureaucrat has their eyes on the property because of some future government project..
November 1st, 2012 at 10:06 pm
It’s owned free and clear, no wonder they want it.
November 2nd, 2012 at 2:23 am
Civil forfeiture is easy to prevent.
Any law can prevent it, even a city or county ordinance, since it is based on English common law, which is only considered the last default if no other law addresses an issue.
An initiative petition requiring a conviction to use civil forfeiture made the police pirate industry vanish in that state.
November 2nd, 2012 at 2:24 am
Sorry, paste up error. The state the initiative petition was passed in was Oregon.
November 2nd, 2012 at 10:19 am
Oregon’s civil forfeiture law update didn’t work out quite as well as you thought: http://www.ij.org/asset-forfeiture-report-oregon
The police are more powerful than we give them credit for. Let’s change that.
November 2nd, 2012 at 11:21 am
Use your own pseudonym, don’t poach mine. If that was an attempt to poke fun at me making a typo correction, it was pretty damned lame.
Civil forfeiture is still dead in Oregon. A civil court tort is not forfeiture.
The state still has to sue, instead of just seize.
Yes, it isn’t good enough for this advocacy group you linked. So what?
November 2nd, 2012 at 11:25 am
And you did not address my original post, that forfeiture can be prevented by locally passed laws. Exactly how did you refute this?
Are you claiming that forfeiture can not be prevented by locally passed laws?
Or are you just some troll looking for something to argue about?
November 2nd, 2012 at 4:27 pm
I did criminal defense and I got known. I got telephone calls from the Chicago police, the Chicago City Attorney, the Cook County State’s Attorney. “Your client’s tenants are dealing drugs. Please evict them”. One of them was as tenuous as having a payphone in the rented fastfood place.
I dunno. The procedure is civil, but the cause is a crime being commited. In any event, the government must prove its case, not the property owner. The minimum standard is civil preponderance of the evidence.
November 2nd, 2012 at 10:40 pm
I had an associate who was a property manager assisting the police in chasing off drug dealers from an apartment complex in houston.. The suspects would run from the cops and climb ober a chain link fence behind the apartments. What he did was coat the fence with bearing grease and then called the cops when he saw them dealing.. Well they could not climb the fence any more and about a dozen were busted.. The next day he was late getting to the office due to a doctors appointment and in the meantime the drug dealers pumped 300 rounds into said office not knowing it was empty… Needless to say he quit his job that day and moved out of state!! That is what the cops are asking you to do when it comes to evicting or chasing off drug dealers!
November 2nd, 2012 at 10:42 pm
nk: Different standards for a civil tort.
In civil forfeiture, the government is claiming that the property is the fruit of a crime ( like pirate loot ), and seizing it under the common law Deodanths principle.
The former owner then has to sue to get it back. Look for cases with strange names like US vs. ( an amount of cash, or an address ).
The former owner is not the subject of the suit, and has to file friend of the court briefs in a desperate attempt to get his property back.
November 3rd, 2012 at 2:03 am
Not to nitpick Kristopher, but there are burdens and burdens. The ultimate burden is always on the guy who wants your property. It’s a derogation of common law and the statute is construed strictly.
November 3rd, 2012 at 2:05 am
*burden of proof*
November 3rd, 2012 at 2:08 am
You guys can make variations of “construed”, if you dare.
November 3rd, 2012 at 11:48 am
Yes, but in a civil forfeiture case, the burden of proof for the state is very low, and original owner has to prove that the property is not the fruit of a crime, regardless of whether or not he was convicted.
This stands the burden of proof on its head.
November 5th, 2012 at 11:21 am
This is one of the bet reasons to always have a morgage on property.