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Does this have any implications for the ridiculous seizures of property police carry out every now and then when they pull someone over who has a large amount o

Does this have any implications for the ridiculous seizures of property police carry out every now and then when they pull someone over who has a large amount of cash on them? The whole idea of a court case titled, e.g., "State of Texas vs $45,000" is asinine. I'd love to see the SCOTUS lay down the law on that bullshit.

tyingq 9y ago
The author seems to think so. "Armed with this ruling, the Nelson decision may set an important precedent to rein in another abusive civil proceeding: civil forfeiture. The parallels are striking"
- MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
  I don't see how though - this ruling is explicitly about a conviction which has been overturned. If there's never a conviction related to the forfeiture in the first place, what bearing would it have? Makes me wonder, could this ruling create a perverse situation where someone is arrested with a large sum of money, but the criminal case against the individual is flimsy, so the prosecution might be tempted to drop charges to ensure that the forfeiture can be kept rather than risk losing it if a conviction is overturned?
  - CalChris 9y ago
    It is about a conviction which has been overturned but the parallel is there. Civil forfeiture is when officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime. not guilty != convicted suspected != convicted If the bar is convicted (and it should be) then the argument will be the same.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > Civil forfeiture is when officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime. Generally, not, as a matter of law. Civil forfeiture is usually premised on the item being gained through or used in illegal (though not necessarily criminal) activity, not necessarily by the owner (innocent parties with an interest in the property have some rights in forfeiture proceedings, separate from the right to assert that the basic premise of the forfeiture is false.) This often overlaps with the owner of the property being suspected of a crime, but being owned by someone who committed a crime is not generally the essence of the legal premise. That's quite distinct from what happened here, where the actual conviction is the legal premise, and thus the conviction being overturned voids the legal premise.
      - CalChris 9y ago
        I know that these are different but the argument should be the same. The legal standard of conviction is not being met. In civil forfeiture, that standard is not being met a priori. In this case where the defendants are ultimately acquitted, that standard is not being met a posteriori. But the argument (IMO) is the same, the legal standard is not being met.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > The legal standard of conviction is not being met. But it's clear, even outside of forfeiture, that that isn't a requirement for losing property to the state for wrongful conduct; civil process (with the government having a cause of action) does exist even outside of forfeiture, even for conduct which also has criminal punishment. There has never been a principal accepted in this country that all government legal remedies against individuals require criminal conviction, which is what you seem to be asserting ad the principal with forfeiture. It's clear that certain types of penalties require criminal conviction, and it's clear (now at least, though that should have been obvious before) that penalties expressly premised on criminal conviction require criminal conviction. But forfeiture doesn't really fall into either of those categories.
        kreneskyp 9y ago
        Can you expand on why civil forfeiture based on suspected criminality shouldn't require criminal conviction? Forcibily taking money from someone for a civil reason (e.g. child support) is obviously different from taking money because you suspect a criminal offense.
      - joshuak 9y ago
        That's reasonable in this case, but I agree with CalChris that the more general case must also fallow. The conviction of a human being must be the bar. At some point in time someone arguing for the state was able to successfully introduce property as a "defendant" of a legal action, and average people go along with that. This is, on the face of it, absurd. All of law exists only to a single purpose, the regulation of actions between humans, not trees, not dogs, not bits of paper with numbers printed on them, human beings. Even someone's example of confiscating counterfeit money is not an action against the wrong doing of the money. It's an action against a human being who believed they were in possession of the money. They are the ones who suffer harm. It is only reasonable for the state to confiscate the "money" from the subject, in this case because it is not money, and as such the harm to the subject was done not by the state's action of confiscation, but by the counterfeiter's action of tricking the subject into accepting it. It follows that it is not reasonable for the state to replace the fake money with real money because that would cause harm to a third party (the state). However, the subject would have a reasonable clam of restitution against the counterfeiter should they be convicted, and the state should support that claim. Labeling an action as forfeiture, as in the case of civil forfeiture, implies a default due to some failure to perform, but that should be proven to the same degree as any question of law. The property does not act, or fail to act, only people can do that. Therefore the state must be obligated to prove that it has reasonable clam to the property, and that the party injured by confiscation are themselves guilty to the degree that such injury is warranted. AND as is the typical structure of law the state suffers the burden of proof to offset the potential for abuse of power.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Pxtl 9y ago
    But if we're assuming the accused is guilty of some crime with which the booty can be charged, can't you also assume that a man who has been declared not-guilty is guilty of some tangentially-related crime that still allows the civil asset forfeiture? IE "John Smith is found not guilty of trafficking for the drugs we thought he had on him, but he still could have got the $5000 from some other incidence of trafficking we failed to discover and therefore we're still charging his assets with trafficking".
    - MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
      Not entirely sure I understand what you're saying, but I don't believe that's the how it works. Civil forfeiture is currently allowed because the property is "charged" with a "crime", and because it's not a person it doesn't have the same protections as people (i.e. innocent until proven guilty). So the "innocence" of the property can't be proven, and thus it is forfeited. So rather than "He still could have gotten the $5000 from a crime", they're saying "The $5000 could still have been transacted in a crime", and the guilt or innocence of the person it was taken from is considered irrelevant.
      - derefr 9y ago
        One interesting contrast for this is in the legal requirements for dealing with counterfeit currency once it's discovered. That really does seem like a case where the person holding the money did nothing wrong, but the money must still be forfeited because the money itself is "doing something wrong" by being counterfeit.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Does this have any implications for the ridiculous seizures of property police carry out every now and then when they pull someone over who has a large amount of cash on them? The author of the article clearly thinks so, as much of the latter part of the article is speculation about how it will impact civil forfeiture, but I doubt it. This case addressed money that the state only had a legal basis for seizing in the first place because of a criminal conviction which was later overturned; a ruling that the conviction being overturned is conclusive as to such seizures, and that the state cannot require a separate civil lawsuit to recover the funds in which innocence must be separately proven (which essentially would let them keep money premised on a criminal conviction with only the evidence necessary to secure a civil judgement) is not likely to be applicable to forfeiture cases, where the basis for the seizure is a civil process independent of criminal conviction.
- jdc0589 9y ago
  somehow I missed that.
  - mark-r 9y ago
    It was easy to miss, as the article was broken into two pages. Almost everything dealing with asset forfeiture was on page two.
anigbrowl 9y ago
Edit: forgot to say that no, this won't have a direct bearing on civil asset forfeiture of the kind you describe, because that only takes place where the identity of the property owner is unknown. The result in terms of not allowing the state to take money from people whose criminal convictions are overturned is great though. -- The idea is not asinine, it's perfectly rational. Cops do a drug bust and all the criminals flee. (I'm personally opposed to drug prohibition but it's the law and the easiest example so I'm going with that for simplicity's sake.) At the scene: 3 bricks of cocaine and $1m dollars. Cocaine is contraband so the cops don't need permission to take it, they can just help themselves to a few fat rails and then throw the rest in a furnace, resell it, or whatever. What about the million bucks? It's property. there might even be a legitimate reason for it to be there (eg suppose it had just been stolen from a bank but the cops had yet to connect the bank robbery with the drug deal). The cops can't just take it, because if that was allowed then cops could just help themselves to any property they see and how would people ever know what happened to it? OK, so there must be some sort of process to document their taking possession of it until said possession is successfully challenged. That's a court's job. On one side, the state entity that employs the cops. On the other...who? The (presumed) drug dealers fled so it's not obvious who the other side of the case should be. American law is built from the ground up around adversarial argument between parties with conflicting interests, so for administrative convenience we'd like to have the case be 'Someone v. someone else' like every other legal case. If we don't know who, let's treat the unclaimed property as its own entity until someone says different. Hence 'State of Jurisdiction v. $1 million.' Practically speaking, this works fine most of the time. If you keep up with legal case news, in any port city you'll see a lot of cases like 'US Customs v. 1000 leather handbags' - sometimes because the handbags in question are knockoffs, sometimes because the paperwork got lost and a shipment ended up in the wrong place, to be later claimed by the rightful owner with documentation. Asset seizure by police has been abused to hell and back, and I have no hesitation in saying that many police officers and institutions are corrupt. But the legal mechanism for classifying abandoned property is not the problem. That's a purely administrative convenience that is entirely neutral in nature. If you didn't have it, then cops would just label the money as 'evidence', it would disappear, and the problem would be worse because there wouldn't even be a paper trail to follow.
- 9y ago
geppeto 9y ago
It does, but not immediately > Ginsburg forcefully rejected Colorado’s argument that “[t]he presumption of innocence applies only at criminal trials" So now all the judges in the land have to rely on that. So people just have to sue in every single state, and federal circuit on civil forfeiture cases, and the judges will have to lean on the new Supreme Court opinions, or get it back to the Supreme Court so that they can clarify specifically on a civil forfeiture case.
- dreamcompiler 9y ago
  I keep getting this vision of America 200 years hence where RBG is as revered as Lincoln for saving the union in a dark time.
  - geppeto 9y ago
    That awkward moment where you realize that you like Trumps court
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Gorsuch didn't take part in the decision. (page 3: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf )
Lazare 9y ago
It suggests that the court might at least be open to revising the rules relating to civil forfeiture on some future case. However, it doesn't change the rules, and it's by no means clear that the court would change the rules, if the question comes before it, nor does it suggest that the question will come up anytime soon. If the court had ruled the other way in this case, there would be no chance of fixing civil forfeiture. So I guess you can say that this isn't a "no", but it's also not a "yes". It's not even a "maybe". But the door is still open?

tyingq 9y ago

The author seems to think so. "Armed with this ruling, the Nelson decision may set an important precedent to rein in another abusive civil proceeding: civil forfeiture. The parallels are striking"

MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
I don't see how though - this ruling is explicitly about a conviction which has been overturned. If there's never a conviction related to the forfeiture in the first place, what bearing would it have? Makes me wonder, could this ruling create a perverse situation where someone is arrested with a large sum of money, but the criminal case against the individual is flimsy, so the prosecution might be tempted to drop charges to ensure that the forfeiture can be kept rather than risk losing it if a conviction is overturned?
- CalChris 9y ago
  It is about a conviction which has been overturned but the parallel is there. Civil forfeiture is when officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime. not guilty != convicted suspected != convicted If the bar is convicted (and it should be) then the argument will be the same.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Civil forfeiture is when officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime. Generally, not, as a matter of law. Civil forfeiture is usually premised on the item being gained through or used in illegal (though not necessarily criminal) activity, not necessarily by the owner (innocent parties with an interest in the property have some rights in forfeiture proceedings, separate from the right to assert that the basic premise of the forfeiture is false.) This often overlaps with the owner of the property being suspected of a crime, but being owned by someone who committed a crime is not generally the essence of the legal premise. That's quite distinct from what happened here, where the actual conviction is the legal premise, and thus the conviction being overturned voids the legal premise.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      I know that these are different but the argument should be the same. The legal standard of conviction is not being met. In civil forfeiture, that standard is not being met a priori. In this case where the defendants are ultimately acquitted, that standard is not being met a posteriori. But the argument (IMO) is the same, the legal standard is not being met.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > The legal standard of conviction is not being met. But it's clear, even outside of forfeiture, that that isn't a requirement for losing property to the state for wrongful conduct; civil process (with the government having a cause of action) does exist even outside of forfeiture, even for conduct which also has criminal punishment. There has never been a principal accepted in this country that all government legal remedies against individuals require criminal conviction, which is what you seem to be asserting ad the principal with forfeiture. It's clear that certain types of penalties require criminal conviction, and it's clear (now at least, though that should have been obvious before) that penalties expressly premised on criminal conviction require criminal conviction. But forfeiture doesn't really fall into either of those categories.
        kreneskyp 9y ago
        Can you expand on why civil forfeiture based on suspected criminality shouldn't require criminal conviction? Forcibily taking money from someone for a civil reason (e.g. child support) is obviously different from taking money because you suspect a criminal offense.
    - joshuak 9y ago
      That's reasonable in this case, but I agree with CalChris that the more general case must also fallow. The conviction of a human being must be the bar. At some point in time someone arguing for the state was able to successfully introduce property as a "defendant" of a legal action, and average people go along with that. This is, on the face of it, absurd. All of law exists only to a single purpose, the regulation of actions between humans, not trees, not dogs, not bits of paper with numbers printed on them, human beings. Even someone's example of confiscating counterfeit money is not an action against the wrong doing of the money. It's an action against a human being who believed they were in possession of the money. They are the ones who suffer harm. It is only reasonable for the state to confiscate the "money" from the subject, in this case because it is not money, and as such the harm to the subject was done not by the state's action of confiscation, but by the counterfeiter's action of tricking the subject into accepting it. It follows that it is not reasonable for the state to replace the fake money with real money because that would cause harm to a third party (the state). However, the subject would have a reasonable clam of restitution against the counterfeiter should they be convicted, and the state should support that claim. Labeling an action as forfeiture, as in the case of civil forfeiture, implies a default due to some failure to perform, but that should be proven to the same degree as any question of law. The property does not act, or fail to act, only people can do that. Therefore the state must be obligated to prove that it has reasonable clam to the property, and that the party injured by confiscation are themselves guilty to the degree that such injury is warranted. AND as is the typical structure of law the state suffers the burden of proof to offset the potential for abuse of power.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Pxtl 9y ago
  But if we're assuming the accused is guilty of some crime with which the booty can be charged, can't you also assume that a man who has been declared not-guilty is guilty of some tangentially-related crime that still allows the civil asset forfeiture? IE "John Smith is found not guilty of trafficking for the drugs we thought he had on him, but he still could have got the $5000 from some other incidence of trafficking we failed to discover and therefore we're still charging his assets with trafficking".
  - MaxfordAndSons 9y ago
    Not entirely sure I understand what you're saying, but I don't believe that's the how it works. Civil forfeiture is currently allowed because the property is "charged" with a "crime", and because it's not a person it doesn't have the same protections as people (i.e. innocent until proven guilty). So the "innocence" of the property can't be proven, and thus it is forfeited. So rather than "He still could have gotten the $5000 from a crime", they're saying "The $5000 could still have been transacted in a crime", and the guilt or innocence of the person it was taken from is considered irrelevant.
    - derefr 9y ago
      One interesting contrast for this is in the legal requirements for dealing with counterfeit currency once it's discovered. That really does seem like a case where the person holding the money did nothing wrong, but the money must still be forfeited because the money itself is "doing something wrong" by being counterfeit.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> Does this have any implications for the ridiculous seizures of property police carry out every now and then when they pull someone over who has a large amount of cash on them? The author of the article clearly thinks so, as much of the latter part of the article is speculation about how it will impact civil forfeiture, but I doubt it. This case addressed money that the state only had a legal basis for seizing in the first place because of a criminal conviction which was later overturned; a ruling that the conviction being overturned is conclusive as to such seizures, and that the state cannot require a separate civil lawsuit to recover the funds in which innocence must be separately proven (which essentially would let them keep money premised on a criminal conviction with only the evidence necessary to secure a civil judgement) is not likely to be applicable to forfeiture cases, where the basis for the seizure is a civil process independent of criminal conviction.

jdc0589 9y ago
somehow I missed that.
- mark-r 9y ago
  It was easy to miss, as the article was broken into two pages. Almost everything dealing with asset forfeiture was on page two.

anigbrowl 9y ago

Edit: forgot to say that no, this won't have a direct bearing on civil asset forfeiture of the kind you describe, because that only takes place where the identity of the property owner is unknown. The result in terms of not allowing the state to take money from people whose criminal convictions are overturned is great though. -- The idea is not asinine, it's perfectly rational. Cops do a drug bust and all the criminals flee. (I'm personally opposed to drug prohibition but it's the law and the easiest example so I'm going with that for simplicity's sake.) At the scene: 3 bricks of cocaine and $1m dollars. Cocaine is contraband so the cops don't need permission to take it, they can just help themselves to a few fat rails and then throw the rest in a furnace, resell it, or whatever. What about the million bucks? It's property. there might even be a legitimate reason for it to be there (eg suppose it had just been stolen from a bank but the cops had yet to connect the bank robbery with the drug deal). The cops can't just take it, because if that was allowed then cops could just help themselves to any property they see and how would people ever know what happened to it? OK, so there must be some sort of process to document their taking possession of it until said possession is successfully challenged. That's a court's job. On one side, the state entity that employs the cops. On the other...who? The (presumed) drug dealers fled so it's not obvious who the other side of the case should be. American law is built from the ground up around adversarial argument between parties with conflicting interests, so for administrative convenience we'd like to have the case be 'Someone v. someone else' like every other legal case. If we don't know who, let's treat the unclaimed property as its own entity until someone says different. Hence 'State of Jurisdiction v. $1 million.' Practically speaking, this works fine most of the time. If you keep up with legal case news, in any port city you'll see a lot of cases like 'US Customs v. 1000 leather handbags' - sometimes because the handbags in question are knockoffs, sometimes because the paperwork got lost and a shipment ended up in the wrong place, to be later claimed by the rightful owner with documentation. Asset seizure by police has been abused to hell and back, and I have no hesitation in saying that many police officers and institutions are corrupt. But the legal mechanism for classifying abandoned property is not the problem. That's a purely administrative convenience that is entirely neutral in nature. If you didn't have it, then cops would just label the money as 'evidence', it would disappear, and the problem would be worse because there wouldn't even be a paper trail to follow.

9y ago

geppeto 9y ago

It does, but not immediately > Ginsburg forcefully rejected Colorado’s argument that “[t]he presumption of innocence applies only at criminal trials" So now all the judges in the land have to rely on that. So people just have to sue in every single state, and federal circuit on civil forfeiture cases, and the judges will have to lean on the new Supreme Court opinions, or get it back to the Supreme Court so that they can clarify specifically on a civil forfeiture case.

dreamcompiler 9y ago
I keep getting this vision of America 200 years hence where RBG is as revered as Lincoln for saving the union in a dark time.
- geppeto 9y ago
  That awkward moment where you realize that you like Trumps court
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Gorsuch didn't take part in the decision. (page 3: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1256_5i36.pdf )

Lazare 9y ago

It suggests that the court might at least be open to revising the rules relating to civil forfeiture on some future case. However, it doesn't change the rules, and it's by no means clear that the court would change the rules, if the question comes before it, nor does it suggest that the question will come up anytime soon. If the court had ruled the other way in this case, there would be no chance of fixing civil forfeiture. So I guess you can say that this isn't a "no", but it's also not a "yes". It's not even a "maybe". But the door is still open?