Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Friday, November 22, 2019
With This Forfeiture Trick, Innocent Owners Lose Even When They Win
Critics of civil forfeiture, the system of legalized theft that
allows law enforcement agencies to seize people's property by alleging
it is connected to criminal activity, often focus on the burden of proof
the government faces when owners try to recover their assets. While
those standards are obviously important, nearly nine out of 10 federal
forfeiture cases never make it to court,
largely because mounting a challenge often costs more than the property
is worth. And while the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA)
allows owners who win in court to recover "reasonable attorney fees and
other litigation costs," prosecutors can defeat that safeguard by
dragging out cases and then dropping them before a judge decides whether
forfeiture is legally justified. In the meantime, desperate
owners may decide to let the government keep some of their property,
even when they are completely innocent. From the government's
perspective, there is no downside. "By gaming the system and denying
property owners a 'win' in court," says
Institute for Justice (I.J.) senior attorney Dan Alban, "federal
prosecutors have found a way to short-circuit judicial oversight of
their activities, while at the same time preserving their ability to
continue to abuse Americans' property rights." I.J. is asking
the U.S. Supreme Court to consider a case that takes aim at such sneaky
tactics, arguing that an owner can "substantially prevail" in a
forfeiture battle, as required by the CAFRA provision
dealing with attorney fees, even if the government returns the property
before it officially loses in court. "The threat of paying attorneys'
fees is a critical check on government abuse," observes
Justin Pearson, another I.J. senior attorney. "Otherwise, there is no
disincentive to stop prosecutors from filing frivolous civil forfeitures
against property belonging to innocent owners."...MORE
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