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The workaround under which civil asset forfeiture operates is that they're not charging the property owner - or the property holder - with anything. They're bri

• the_only_law 4y ago
  > The property itself is the defendant Hope it has a good lawyer then I guess?
  • thfuran 4y ago
    Hah. Boxes don't have a right to representation.
    • ASalazarMX 4y ago
      If only the owner was reachable to answer for the boxes instead.
• dimal 4y ago
  How on earth is this able to stand? It’s absurd. Have challenges made it to the Supreme Court and lost?
  • sandworm101 4y ago
    Customs /international shipments. There is a long history of seizing illegal or suspect material at boarder crossings where the actual owner/importer is unknown or not available. A funny-named lawsuit against a box is significantly better than the alternative: zero legal process and no case recorded anywhere.
    • arcticbull 4y ago
      Agreed, it makes sense in some contexts. The issue with asset forfeiture is that the state pretends not to know who the owner is so they can move forward in rem. [edit] Well, two problems: frequently the entity seizing the property gets to keep it and add it to their budget - or split the proceeds. This creates an incentive for them to move forward this way.
    • jazzyjackson 4y ago
      > lawsuit against a box I just can't make sense of the "vs" in the case titles, in what way is the object fighting back? Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ?
      • sandworm101 4y ago
        Legal Research and Writing day one: it is never written as "vs", always "v." It is Roe v. Wade, not Roe vs. Wade.
      • Goronmon 4y ago
        Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ? I would assume the legal procedure is what determines what actually happens to the object. Just like the police arrest people but don't sentence them or put them in prison directly.
    • R0b0t1 4y ago
      It'd be better to do a John Doe case, because an item can't represent itself. A hyptothetical defndant can. There's also the problem of you have no rights at the border anyway, even though you should.
• Buttons840 4y ago
  So the defense of violating people's right to be secure from seizurs is some mumbo jumbo about charging objects with a crime? How does charging anyone or anything relate to the 6th amendment?
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • mysterydip 4y ago
    People have constitutional rights, objects do not
    • edrxty 4y ago
      And objects can't commit crimes
      • daniel-cussen 4y ago
        Yeah no guilty mind.
      • netizen-936824 4y ago
        It's about being used in the commission of a crime, not that the object committed the crime itself
        • function_seven 4y ago
          If that's the case, then what's the point in seizing it? The crime has already been committed, the pile of money being taken doesn't change that one bit. If I use a payphone to order a hit, is it reasonable for the government to come rip it out of the ground? What if I use a freeway to smuggle drugs? Now the road must be torn out? Money is fungible and has all sorts of uses. Any particular pile of cash is no more or less likely to be intrinsically criminal in nature. Just like phones and freeways.
          • 4y ago
• some_random 4y ago
  It obviously should be illegal, it's a legal shenanigan on tier with "your honor I didn't assault that man, I was simply swinging my fists and his face got in the way"
  • jjoonathan 4y ago
    It's every bit as dumb as "sovereign citizens" trying to argue that they aren't subject to traffic laws because of a centuries old maritime treaty. Unfortunately, it's the people in charge slinging the dumb argument, so it flies.
    • robonerd 4y ago
      Governments doing stupid shit like this only encourages "sovereign citizens" to think similar word games and semantics will work for them too. They're naive of course; they seem to think the system is a machine indifferent to class or social standing, which simply isn't the case.
      • whatshisface 4y ago
        Class or social standing aren't the right lens for this, I don't think Warren Buffet vs. Three Dollars would fly in court.
        • robonerd 4y ago
          Warren Buffet could do it if he wanted, using his wealth to earn the favor of the right government officials. He could even buy himself a private police force to do the seizing. A real police force, licensed by the state but employed and paid by himself. This sort of thing is already a reality in America. Anyway, my point is sovereign citizens seem to see the system as a machine, the function of which can be manipulated by giving it cleverly formulated inputs. They have a hacker mindset. They see lawyers and politicians doing this sort of thing all the time, and believe they can do the same if only they find the right incantation. It's as though somebody witnesses the Fonz hit a jukebox to make it work, then figure they can do the same trick if they hit that jukebox in the same way. Except it will never work for them, the jukebox only behaves that way for the Fonz.
• JPKab 4y ago
  The case titles are utterly hilarious, and do such a great job in highlighting the absurdity of this entire process.
• theptip 4y ago
  I didn’t know this, thanks. This is preposterous. I was already strongly opposed to civil forfeiture but the shaky constitutional foundation makes things even worse (if that was possible).
• thelock85 4y ago
  I'm curious to if/how this relates to corporations having free speech rights under Citizens United vs. FEC. Property is an asset, not a corporation (though could a corp. be an asset of a holding company?) but philosophically-speaking, "property itself as a defendant" and "corporation as a legal individual" seems connected.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    Of course the same party who says that corporations should have “free speech rights” are the same ones that target corporations that speak out against their policies. It almost happened in GA with Delta Airlines and did happen in Florida with Disney. In the case of Florida, if it isn’t struck down, it’s going to caused the cities in the surrounding area to have to pay higher taxes and take on Disney’s debts.
• mometsi 4y ago
  The "defendant" arg is passed by value and can't be null. The hack they came up with is to just disable type checking and pass in whatever object they have available. TFA describes the inevitable runtime errors
  • hn_version_0023 4y ago
    This is precisely like the prohibition on “cruel AND unusual punishment” being circumvented by making cruelty usual. I’d mourn for the US, but it seems it’s been dead & gone longer than I’ve been alive.
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      This country was founded with a workforce of slaves and indentured servants, ankle deep in the blood of natives. One might rationalize with difficulty some way to argue the US isn't racist by design because of that, but to argue that it was civil libertarian is a step too far. The civil libertarian language comes from being heavily seeded by small Protestant cults, but not wanting to fall into European-style religious wars over it. Also, ironically, to protect the rights of a slaveholding minority.
    • R0b0t1 4y ago
      I've thought about that one a lot and I think it is the real intention. The admitted purpose of punishment in the legal system is punishment, not rehabilitation. That is something that can be change, but until it is, only punishments both cruel and unusual are prohibited. Unusual but not cruel punishments allow for flexibility like forcing someone to write a paper or read a book. Other punishments, like putting someone in a cage, are necessarily cruel.
• marcosdumay 4y ago
  Lawyers have that habit of taking an obviously false fact and rewrite it so that you can't prove by Boolean logic using laws or prior legal decisions as premises that they are false. Instead, you have to recourse for synonyms or even to the words meaning (some times, the meaning as used, not as the dictionary says). Then they pretend the new writing is a completely different thing from the meanings it convoys, and that what they said is absolutely true, since you can't algebraically prove it's false. That practice should be a crime, by itself.
• Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  Which just goes to show how absolutely fucking insane our court system is. Any sane court system would believe that charging an inanimate object with a crime is beyond bonkers.
• cameldrv 4y ago
  The issue is that in rem jurisdiction was originally intended and justified for cases where the owner of the property was unknown or beyond the reach of the law (say overseas.) The early cases were things like an overseas shipper not paying proper import taxes. For cases like this, in rem seems reasonable to me. Where things went off the rails is when they started applying this to cases where the owner of the property was known, and that owner should have their normal fourth amendment rights.
  • r3trohack3r 4y ago
    You give the government an inch and, historically over and over again, they take a mile. The Presidential Surveillance Program was justified using Smith v. Maryland. The argument was that, if Smith had no reasonable expectation of privacy for metadata in isolation, no aggregate of citizens had an expectation of privacy. Therefore mass surveillance of metadata is legal. You let the government see the phone records of one citizen without a warrant and decades later you have something like 33% of all email, TCP/IP, and phone metadata being collected and analyzed by a government agency without a warrant. The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets. You let the government regulate speech that poses a clear and present danger and they use that to make it illegal to oppose a draft.
    • arcticbull 4y ago
      > The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets. This whole 'you can't yell fire in a crowded theater' thing is not a real thing. Per @popehat: 5/ '"shout fire in a theater" is a rhetorical device used in 1919 to justify jailing people for writing anti-draft pamphlets in World War I. The First Amendment standard (to use the term generously) applied in that case has been dead for more than a half-century.' 6/ 'The same judge went on to smirk "three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify forcible government sterilization of persons deemed undesirable by the state, so you know, he had a way with words.' 7/ 'So when you trot out "you can't shout fire in a theater" in response to a First Amendment question, you're using the catchphrase a eugenicist used to support jailing people for criticizing the draft in a case that hasn't been good law for a half century.' [1] [1] https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1356670918706089985 https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1356670918706089985
• r3trohack3r 4y ago
  One of my favorite (although also sad) was the time the U.S. Government sued a bunch of shark fins: United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.
• whiddershins 4y ago
  Creative accounting can still be fraud. Bringing a civil suit doesn’t change the fundamental fact of this being unreasonable seizure. It’s seizure. And it’s unreasonable. Naming it something else or inventing a process for doing it doesn’t change reality.
• 8note 4y ago
  Next we'll start charging animals of murder again. Maybe Chassenée's rats will show up for the US government to be tried
• pmyteh 4y ago
  It's common in admiralty law everywhere. If you have a ship that hasn't paid its docking fees, what can you do? The owner is an ocean away and won't come to court even if you find a way to inform them. If you let the ship sail the port will never be paid. It can be arrested and, if necessary, auctioned to pay the debt. But you can't do that without a court order. So there is an in rem action against the ship itself. It makes perfect sense in that context (and in the one that other commentators have mentioned, which is unaccompanied packages of contraband). Also prize and salvage actions, which are also admiralty proceedings. The difficulty comes when you stretch the concept like with civil forfeiture. It's not even necessary: England and Wales has the Proceeds of Crime Act to allow seizure and forfeiture of criminal property and all the cases under that are ordinary in personam actions between the state and the putative criminal.
  • gwright 4y ago
    Hmm. I've been wondering why all the Russian yachts have been "arrested" lately in the news as opposed to "seized", for example. It sounded very strange to me as I thought that "arrested" only applied to people. Your use in this comment make me think that usage is tied to this legal concept of in rem.
  • account42 4y ago
    > If you have a ship that hasn't paid its docking fees, what can you do? You can sue the owner. If they don't show up that doesn't mean that they automatically win the case - if anything, it's the opposite. If you can't identify the owner you can make the case against John Doe and still have a state appointed defender represent the owner's rights. You can get a court-ordered injunction to detain the ship until the case is resolved. I don't see why you need to invent a new legal concept here at all - other that it makes things easier for the state to seize things when they don't need to worry about such pesky things as rights.