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In an ideal world, police would amass evidence of wrong doing _before_ seizing property.
by dleslie 5y ago
In an ideal world, police would amass evidence of wrong doing _before_ seizing property.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoSure, but there's a season why these forfeiture laws, as terrible as they have turned out to be, came into being. The claim was that criminals with large assets who realized they were under investigation would do something to "squirrel away" their wealth, putting it out of reach if they were caught. The justification for the law(s) was to preemptively grab stuff to avoid this possibility.
- svachalek 5y agoI can live with seizing assets before conviction, even though it makes me uncomfortable in principle, but mass seizure of assets with a "guilty until proven innocent" policy is just beyond the pale. It's the next step now that we've accepted that we're all wiretapped, all the time. This needs to stop or the Bill of Rights means nothing.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> criminals with large assets who realized they were under investigation would do something to "squirrel away" their wealth In cases of drivers with cash, this problem is solved by the police arresting the individual and holding the cash.
- bcrosby95 5y agoThe source of these laws were actually pretty pragmatic. The point was to help enforce custom duties on people that would never step foot in the country. Instead of trying to chase someone down in, for example, France, that didn't pay their customs duties (not really practical in the 19th century), they seized the ship and the contents of it.