DrugPolicyCases.com | |||
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Asset Forfeitures Civil forfeiture laws allow the government to seize any property that is implicated in drug-related activities and then use the revenue to support law enforcement. (Usually the forfeited property gets appropriated by the same law enforcement agency that seized it.) Generally, the government can seize property and detain it pending trial on a mere "probable cause" standard, with the exception of real estate. The owner of the property needs not be found guilty before the property is seized. It's not even necessary that anyone be charged with a crime to forfeit property. This section of the site contains excerpts from various opinions that discuss asset forfeitures. Pages: ‹1› ‹2› ‹3› ‹4› ‹5› ‹6›
I join the Court's opinion subject to a qualification against reading our holding as a general endorsement of warrantless seizures of anything a State chooses to call "contraband," whether or not the property happens to be in public when seized. The Fourth Amendment does not concede any talismanic significance to use of the term "contraband" whenever a legislature may resort to a novel forfeiture sanction in the interest of law enforcement, as legislatures are evincing increasing ingenuity in doing...
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...[T]he particularly troubling aspect of this case is not that the State provides a weak excuse for failing to obtain a warrant either before or after White's arrest, but that it offers us no reason at all. The justification cannot be that the authorities feared their narcotics investigation would be exposed and hindered if a warrant had been obtained. Ex parte warrant applications provide neutral review of police determinations of probable cause, but such procedures are by no means public. And the officers had months to take advantage of them. On this record, one must assume that the officers who seized White's car simply preferred to avoid the hassle of seeking approval from a judicial officer. I would not permit bare convenience to overcome our established preference for the warrant process as a check against arbitrary intrusions by law enforcement agencies "engaged in the often competitive" -- and, here, potentially lucrative -- "enterprise of ferreting out crime." Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 14-15, 92 L. Ed. 436, 68 S. Ct. 367 (1948).
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JUSTICE KENNEDY's dramatic suggestion that our construction of the 1984 amendment [providing for the innocent owner defense] "rips out," the "centerpiece of the Nation's drug enforcement laws," rests on what he characterizes as the "safe" assumption that the innocent owner defense would be available to "an associate" of a criminal who could "shelter the proceeds from forfeiture, to be reacquired once he is clear from law enforcement authorities." As a matter of fact, forfeitable proceeds are much more likely to be possessed by drug dealers themselves than by transferees sufficiently remote to qualify as innocent owners; as a matter of law, it is quite clear that neither an "associate" in the criminal enterprise nor a temporary custodian of drug proceeds would qualify as an innocent owner; indeed, neither would a sham bona fide purchaser.
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It is my obligation to say, however, that the plurality's opinion leaves the forfeiture scheme that is the centerpiece of the Nation's drug enforcement laws in quite a mess.
The practical difficulties created by the plurality's interpretation of § 881 [the innocent owner exception] are immense, and we should not assume Congress intended such results when it enacted § 881(a)(6). To start, the plurality's interpretation of § 881(a)(6) conflicts with the principal purpose we have identified for forfeiture under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Act, which is "the desire to lessen the economic power of ... drug enterprises." Caplin & Drysdale, Chartered v. United States, 491 U.S. 617, 630, 105 L. Ed. 2d 528, 109 S. Ct. 2646, 109 S. Ct. 2667 (1989). [...]
Another oddity now given to us by the plurality's interpretation is that a gratuitous transferee must forfeit the proceeds of a drug deal if she knew of the drug deal before she received the proceeds but not if she discovered it a moment after.
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