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Despite being charged with no crime, more than half a million Americans have been robbed by government agents on the nation’s sidewalks, highways and airports in recent decades.
Federal law enforcement agencies arbitrarily confiscate more property from Americans each year than all the burglars steal nationwide. Asset forfeiture is a plague upon constitutional rights.
Any BS pretext will do nowadays to nullify property rights. After the FBI illegally ransacked safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills in 2021, federal prosecutors justified seizing bundled bills because they were wrapped with rubber bands, sufficient proof that the owners were “either a top-level drug trafficker or money launderer.”
Confiscation was also justified because one of the boxholders had a vehicle with Illinois license plates, and an FBI agent swore that “Chicago, Illinois is a hub of both drug trafficking and money laundering.”
Indiana’s solicitor general told the US Supreme Court in 2018 that the government is entitled to confiscate any car or truck that exceeds the speed limit.
The Alaska Supreme Court responded: “Hold my beer!”
This year, that court upheld the confiscation of a $95,000 airplane from a bush pilot who flew a passenger and luggage to the remote village of Beaver, a locale that banned all alcohol.
The pilot lost his plane after state troopers discovered a six-pack of beer in a passenger’s luggage. To add insult to injury, it was Bud Light.
The US Supreme Court may take that case.
Legal absurdities perpetually permeate forfeiture cases. The Supreme Court reeled in an 1827 Spanish pirate ship to justify seizing a 1977 Pontiac. That car was co-owned by a woman whose husband was nabbed getting a front-seat toot from a Detroit prostitute. Before Monica Lewinsky became famous, Clinton administration lawyers perversely blamed Tina Bennis for failing to stop her husband’s philandering.
Luckily, lawyers, activists and even moviemakers are fighting back. A new documentary, “When Cops Become Robbers,” vividly portrays how forfeiture ravages innocent victims.
Anthonia Nwaorie, a 59-year-old nurse living in Texas, was fleeced of $41,377 by Customs and Border Protection agents solely because she failed to fill out a federal form declaring she was taking more than $10,000 out of the United States.
Eh Wah, a Burmese band manager, was mulcted of $33,000 by marauding Muskogee, Okla., deputies. Wah planned to send the money to a Christian college in his home country, but the deputies basely claimed his cash was from drug dealing.
Both those travesties were torpedoed by lawyer Dan Alban, America’s forfeiture knockout champion.
Alban, co-director of the Institute for Justice’s National Initiative to End Forfeiture Abuse, explains that civil forfeiture allows law enforcement to “seize someone’s property and permanently keep it without even charging them with a crime.” He’s enraged that government is “acting as the predator and treating people like ATMs.”
Alban has thwarted forfeitures from the mean streets of Detroit to the plains of Wyoming, to the corridors of the Pittsburgh airport, to the highways of San Bernardino, Calif., to the notorious Courtroom 478 in Philadelphia City Hall and plenty of places in between.
The only American-born forfeiture victim showcased in “When Cops Become Robbers” is Mandrel Stuart, a black restaurant owner. Police stopped his SUV in Fairfax County, Va., in 2012 purportedly because of his tinted windows and a video playing in his sightline. Cops found $17,550 in his vehicle and seized it, claiming it was drug proceeds.
Stuart denied the charge, and a jury two years later gave him back his money along with his attorney fees. But due to the case’s toll, “I had gone back to selling marijuana,” Stuart confessed on camera, “to make extra money to provide for my family.”
Virginia court records show Stuart was arrested for selling drugs in the years before and after the forfeiture. The movie misrepresents Stuart’s police encounter, implying it occurred in the dark of night instead of the middle of an August afternoon.
“When Cops Become Robbers” seeks to be harrowing but is too often mystifying. Much of the documentary suffers from an underground-bomb-shelter motif. One viewer lamented that the movie made her “feel like I have cataracts and I can’t see.”
A Seattle University professor was filmed laboriously placing a large poster on the wall detailing the forfeiture process, but the camera never zooms in to let people read the text. Filmmakers use clunky 1980s glowing computer lettering for their narrative. Seeking to be hip (?), interviewees are often shown speaking on small screens of old televisions. Good luck watching that on your cellphone.
You can see it free online at fawesome.tv/movies/10737611/when-cops-become-robbers.
Unfortunately, the movie omits how Transportation Security Administration and Drug Enforcement Administration agents automatically confiscate the cash of any domestic traveler they detect with more than $5,000 — their magic threshold for money being “suspicious.” Alban helped expose this crime wave, declaring, “This is something that we know is happening all across the United States. People who have been traveling to buy used cars or buy equipment for their business had their cash seized.”
The DEA’s Asset Forfeiture program’s unofficial motto is “You make it, we’ll take it.” DEA agents ludicrously pretend that “traveling without checked luggage” is a giveaway for drug traffickers, per an inspector general report. Who knew the de facto federal surcharge for not checking luggage was more outrageous than the airlines’ fees for checking bags?
US Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are championing the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR) to fix forfeiture by requiring “clear and convincing evidence” before federal agencies can seize private property. The FAIR Act would also end the profit incentive for law enforcement to directly pocket what they plunder. It would severely weaken what Alban calls the “law enforcement-industrial complex.”
But for 30 years, that complex has routed efforts to fundamentally curb law enforcement tyranny. Forfeiture is an acid test of democracy. If politicians cannot even stop officialdom from pillaging hapless citizens on absurd pretexts, perhaps the Bill of Rights should be replaced by a simple notice: “Tough luck, chumps!”