13 ms·

This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the po

This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling. A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap. This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.

iwontberude 2y ago
It's not useless because indefinite means never. At least this will require police departments to define the time and therefore make it less likely the stuff walks off, which will encourage keeping it for shorter periods of time.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  How about thirty years (but only if the person is still alive)? It's not indefinite, and it complies with the ruling.
  - tempest_ 2y ago
    How about 300 years? anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling. Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing and as a layman that feels like a feature not a bug.
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      > Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing I wouldn't be so sure. Cops have implicit prosecutorial attorneys too that have a lot more experience with such cases than do defense attorneys. There is no substitute for clarity in law. All else opens the door to exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - iwontberude 2y ago
      That means they have to be able to hold onto the property for 300 years and be able to verifiably return it to the estate beneficiaries. That costs a lot of money, better to just hold onto things for a short period of time while they are relevant and not steal them or throw them away.
    - ffgjgf1 2y ago
      > anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling. If the definition of the word “reasonable” was left in the other half then sure. It’s the job that of the court to define what is “reasonable” on a case by case basis and establish a precedent. They can’t start coming up with laws themselves that clearly establish universal and specific limits.
  - alpinisme 2y ago
    It would not comply the with ruling unless they could provide “reasonable” grounds for holding it that long, and any precisely specified length of time would probably run afoul of the ruling, since that would by definition be specifying the length of time the police could hold it without reason (they could well give it back because they have no continued use for it, but they choose to withhold it arbitrarily because they can, since the deadline for return hasn’t arrived)
- aaronmdjones 2y ago
  Indefinite does not mean never; that's what infinite means. An indefinite amount of time means not a definitive amount of time; i.e. "we don't know how long".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- AdrianB1 2y ago
  It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires another court to decide what "reasonable" means in each case, with the time and cost associated with boing to court. A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).
nathan_compton 2y ago
Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point. My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  > a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in the rulebook. > if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down. This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
  - nathan_compton 2y ago
    Old laws are among the most likely to have deviated from their intended functionality. In my imaginary system, though, someone would have to raise the case to the courts, so it wouldn't be just happening all the time.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  > laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those. Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - BartjeD 2y ago
Almondsetat 2y ago
As the article reports, the ruling actually states that the amount of time must be reasonable. Any gross or blatant violation would be picked up by any lawyer or judge.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without getting into specifics. This means the language can reclaim memory whenever it deems a violation has occurred. How well do you think would that work for the program? Not very well.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    As much as programmers like to draw analogies between law and code, they don't really work the same way at all.
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      > they don't really work the same way Why not? It would seem that you're just used to a state of exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice. Sometimes it helps to see things from an outsider's perspective.
      - lolinder 2y ago
        I'm not commenting on the way things should be, I'm commenting on the way things are. And if you're saying that this ruling is bad because it doesn't work well in an idealized model of the law as you think it should be... that's an interesting observation, but you can hardly fault the judge for crafting a ruling that works in the context of the actual legal system.
      - SllX 2y ago
        Because laws are executed by people, not computers.
lolinder 2y ago
It's not perfect, but forcing police to define the time that something will be taken does go a long way to shining a light into their intentions and make it easier to prove that they're being unreasonable. "Local police department claims right to hold things for 30 years without a warrant" is a much better headline that would draw a lot more scrutiny from local voters and councils than just "the police won't tell me when I'll get my stuff back".
njovin 2y ago
I wouldn't call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on when property can be held: > If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the plaintiffs’ effects dissipated, and if no new justification for retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged the MPD to return the plaintiffs’ effects. ...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay: > we do not suggest that it must always return the property instantaneously. Matching a person with his effects can be difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory. The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.
- Yoofie 2y ago
  This is easily bypassed and/or worked around. What is to prevent an indefinite investigation? The FBI D.B Cooper case was open for decades, for example.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    They same thing that would prevent anything else they do, being taken to court. It’s the only thing they fear.
  - dwighttk 2y ago
    Well if db cooper wants to come claim his property…
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
A court can't set hard limits. It's up to a legislative body to enact clearly defined laws.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
  - thereisnospork 2y ago
    But what happens when the property is something that cant be reasonably returned in 30 or 60 days? Maybe it's a cruise ship that got seized and needs to be be made sea worthy before being transported? Hard numbers don't allow for edge cases, the vagueness is a feature not a bug.
    - xnyan 2y ago
      Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken your stuff, not on the person who's stuff has been taken. >vagueness is a feature not a bug. A feature for who? Where's the evedence that law enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge that in this specific case there's a good reason not to do so.
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug for the individual. Real life doesn't not have time caps. How many days can a person go without food, without a livelihood, without his property that supports his existence? There are time caps for each of these things. Imagine if prison sentences didn't define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep extending the duration beyond a defined limit.
paddy_m 2y ago
I once heard of a behavioral economics paper that said you can reliably predict a judge's ruling on a legal or ethics matter based on what is best for the legal profession.
- giantg2 2y ago
  This is why judicial records are so secret that you can't even subpoena exculpatory evidence from them. They want to protect the image of the judicial system. So old fashioned. In today's world, you build trust with transparency... assuming your organization isn't rotten...
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    I challenge this kind of thinking. Why haven't other highly developed democracies decayed in the same way? Wouldn't all judges, everywhere, behave in the same way?
    - giantg2 2y ago
      What actions do you have in mind? Where are those actions happening or not? How do you think the decay of democracy is tied to judicial secrecy/immunity?
mattmaroon 2y ago
It would not be up to the police to define but a court. And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can. Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual. Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
  - mattmaroon 2y ago
    Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the current status of indefinite asset seizure being essentially the law of the land everywhere. Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc. You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional. It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary. This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.
exabrial 2y ago
Baby steps though, progress not perfection. None of your points are invalid
lokar 2y ago
IANAL, but I don’t think they are supposed to. They decide the case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but that’s not authoritative. We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.
- lucianbr 2y ago
  > We will have to wait I seem to remember something about "justice delayed". Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    More like "this is how you creep in justice". You set a date and politicians will spend months determining what's too long/too short. Or in this case, the judges may not get a unanimous ruling as easily. The article mentions that this is a DC appeals court that establishes this, and several other circuits have rules otherwise. The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court case to set precedent on what is "too long" and use that as a reference for future court cases. Or in this case, it may in fact go to the supreme court who will be able to determine a more concrete time (or just throw it all away and doom us all).
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      Given the prior majority of appeals courts deciding the other way, it seems like something of a waste of time to figure out a time period. Better to say "you can't hold it for an unreasonable period, and 14 months was unreasonable" It will have to be resolved at the Supreme Court level anyway, given the US Court of Appeals split.
      - rodgerd 2y ago
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That’s why a reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  Exemptions for edge cases would benefit only the government. Moreover, the exemptions would take away the individual's rights even more, which is exactly what the citizenry need to guard against.
userbinator 2y ago
Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap. For many serious crimes, they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment
nimbius 2y ago
I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3 months. Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice. Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused. Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back. Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.
- giantg2 2y ago
  Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being tried, and without the protections of the criminal system). On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
  - sneak 2y ago
    If you don’t consent to searches, cops that want to search you will either simply search you illegally anyway, or call out dogs that are trained to alert whenever the cops want them to. There’s a reason that K-9 units are called “probable cause on four legs”.
    - EasyMark 2y ago
      Not true, I have refused a “look over”of my car for two traffic stops, both cops threatened canine cops and I told them go ahead. One radioed in “not available”, The other one went back to his car and wrote me a ticket and told me I was lucky he got another call while he was filling out the ticket. I’m sure they sometimes do “do it anyway” but it isn’t a sure thing.
      - bluGill 2y ago
giantg2 2y ago
There is a cap implied. The only reasonable reason to hold the property is for evidence. Once the statue of limitation runs out, or the appeals process is exhausted, there is no reasonable reason to hold the property anymore.
gist 2y ago
> but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling. Not always correct as a principle. To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more. For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case'. Anyway to the point how much would people think is 'reasonable'? 10 years - no way 5 years - no way (unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial) 1 year - probably not 1 month - might be to short ... and so on. I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the 'last minute' with timing and so on.
solidsnack9000 2y ago
One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation, as you mention; but judges don't write legislation. There is a way the rules develop as "common law" -- via judicial decisions -- but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up through several cases that cover different situations. For example: - There would be cases where a person's medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days. - There would be cases where a person's groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks. - And so on. It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.
IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago
This is a good point. I've always thought a constitutional amendment to make every law in the books auto sunset, unless explicitly voted in by congress I would think this would have made the PATRIOT ACT obsolete some time ago, among other things
- shkkmo 2y ago
  The Patriot act was reauthorized (in part) several times, but expired in 2020.
lr4444lr 2y ago
It's not useless at all. It provides the framework for lawyers all across the nation to contest property detentions on a case by case basis, some will find sympathetic judgments, and the facts behind the case law results will be cited and reused in further rulings.
backtoyoujim 2y ago
https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-serving-prisoners-tales-of-incarceration-without-end-efc930b198d7 https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-servin... "James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with an additional 3,318 years" The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US
- fencepost 2y ago
  I suspect that this pattern for sentencing is so that even if some charges/convictions are reversed the remaining sentence makes that reversal not really significant in real-world terms.
porknubbins 2y ago
It is very common to naively think laws should be rewritten to be clearer but experience quickly shows why that doesn’t work. Basically laws can only work when they are interpreted by reasonable jurists because the real world is full of grey areas and human language is not clear enough to fully divide the space of “everything that can happen in the world” into clear legal and illegal categories. In programming terms, an appeal’s court deciding an exact number of days police can confiscate property is like hard coding in a global constant that then can never be changed, deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that, which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of the file that people see and can have input into.
lobochrome 2y ago
How does a judge get rich?
hansvm 2y ago
With qualified immunity on the books, if the police reach into your car and steal something important then you're out of luck. I'm not optimistic that better definitions around this particular method of theft would have any effect at all on the fruits of that power imbalance.
photonthug 2y ago
> This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich The best part is the insulting pretense that it’s all very rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it’s convenient. If you watch kids often enough you’ll occasionally observe the kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding fair play, etc. These bully’s become lawyers instead of cops. The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that it’s easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting impacts. It’s all so fragile.
datavirtue 2y ago
I think a lot of your complaint is a result of too many laws. Why don't we establish principles instead of trying to nail down every edge case. It's the edge cases that enrich the legal profession and leave the law open to abuse. All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to punish a certain individual or company (tiktok). It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the intent.
maxwell 2y ago
Maybe civil law is objectively superior to common law.
WhyNotHugo 2y ago
I immediately thought of the same thing. They'll stop retaining seized property indefinitely and start retaining it for 7 decades instead.
germandiago 2y ago
I am no lawyer or something like that. I think the full topic must be much more complex than that. However, I agree there should be a lot of simplification and there is a lot of overregulation and contradictions.
that_guy_iain 2y ago
> This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it back after 14 days. It however does provide the very useful definition of why it can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for retaining it.
LorenPechtel 2y ago
I don't think it's remotely practical to have a hard limit because what's entirely reasonable in some cases is entirely unreasonable in others. Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break that limit they automatically become liable for replacement with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.
- vdqtp3 2y ago
  > The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic. They'd be paying for it with our money. Standard economic drives don't affect organizations that are funded with someone else's money.
jknoepfler 2y ago
Judges are rich?

iwontberude 2y ago

It's not useless because indefinite means never. At least this will require police departments to define the time and therefore make it less likely the stuff walks off, which will encourage keeping it for shorter periods of time.

OutOfHere 2y ago
How about thirty years (but only if the person is still alive)? It's not indefinite, and it complies with the ruling.
- tempest_ 2y ago
  How about 300 years? anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling. Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing and as a layman that feels like a feature not a bug.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    > Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing I wouldn't be so sure. Cops have implicit prosecutorial attorneys too that have a lot more experience with such cases than do defense attorneys. There is no substitute for clarity in law. All else opens the door to exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - iwontberude 2y ago
    That means they have to be able to hold onto the property for 300 years and be able to verifiably return it to the estate beneficiaries. That costs a lot of money, better to just hold onto things for a short period of time while they are relevant and not steal them or throw them away.
  - ffgjgf1 2y ago
    > anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling. If the definition of the word “reasonable” was left in the other half then sure. It’s the job that of the court to define what is “reasonable” on a case by case basis and establish a precedent. They can’t start coming up with laws themselves that clearly establish universal and specific limits.
- alpinisme 2y ago
  It would not comply the with ruling unless they could provide “reasonable” grounds for holding it that long, and any precisely specified length of time would probably run afoul of the ruling, since that would by definition be specifying the length of time the police could hold it without reason (they could well give it back because they have no continued use for it, but they choose to withhold it arbitrarily because they can, since the deadline for return hasn’t arrived)
aaronmdjones 2y ago
Indefinite does not mean never; that's what infinite means. An indefinite amount of time means not a definitive amount of time; i.e. "we don't know how long".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
AdrianB1 2y ago
It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires another court to decide what "reasonable" means in each case, with the time and cost associated with boing to court. A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).

nathan_compton 2y ago

Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point. My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.

OutOfHere 2y ago
> a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in the rulebook. > if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down. This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
- nathan_compton 2y ago
  Old laws are among the most likely to have deviated from their intended functionality. In my imaginary system, though, someone would have to raise the case to the courts, so it wouldn't be just happening all the time.
marcosdumay 2y ago
> laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those. Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BartjeD 2y ago

Almondsetat 2y ago

As the article reports, the ruling actually states that the amount of time must be reasonable. Any gross or blatant violation would be picked up by any lawyer or judge.

OutOfHere 2y ago
Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without getting into specifics. This means the language can reclaim memory whenever it deems a violation has occurred. How well do you think would that work for the program? Not very well.
- lolinder 2y ago
  As much as programmers like to draw analogies between law and code, they don't really work the same way at all.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    > they don't really work the same way Why not? It would seem that you're just used to a state of exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice. Sometimes it helps to see things from an outsider's perspective.
    - lolinder 2y ago
      I'm not commenting on the way things should be, I'm commenting on the way things are. And if you're saying that this ruling is bad because it doesn't work well in an idealized model of the law as you think it should be... that's an interesting observation, but you can hardly fault the judge for crafting a ruling that works in the context of the actual legal system.
    - SllX 2y ago
      Because laws are executed by people, not computers.

lolinder 2y ago

It's not perfect, but forcing police to define the time that something will be taken does go a long way to shining a light into their intentions and make it easier to prove that they're being unreasonable. "Local police department claims right to hold things for 30 years without a warrant" is a much better headline that would draw a lot more scrutiny from local voters and councils than just "the police won't tell me when I'll get my stuff back".

njovin 2y ago

I wouldn't call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on when property can be held: > If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the plaintiffs’ effects dissipated, and if no new justification for retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged the MPD to return the plaintiffs’ effects. ...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay: > we do not suggest that it must always return the property instantaneously. Matching a person with his effects can be difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory. The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.

Yoofie 2y ago
This is easily bypassed and/or worked around. What is to prevent an indefinite investigation? The FBI D.B Cooper case was open for decades, for example.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  They same thing that would prevent anything else they do, being taken to court. It’s the only thing they fear.
- dwighttk 2y ago
  Well if db cooper wants to come claim his property…

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

A court can't set hard limits. It's up to a legislative body to enact clearly defined laws.

OutOfHere 2y ago
A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
- thereisnospork 2y ago
  But what happens when the property is something that cant be reasonably returned in 30 or 60 days? Maybe it's a cruise ship that got seized and needs to be be made sea worthy before being transported? Hard numbers don't allow for edge cases, the vagueness is a feature not a bug.
  - xnyan 2y ago
    Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken your stuff, not on the person who's stuff has been taken. >vagueness is a feature not a bug. A feature for who? Where's the evedence that law enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge that in this specific case there's a good reason not to do so.
  - OutOfHere 2y ago
    The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug for the individual. Real life doesn't not have time caps. How many days can a person go without food, without a livelihood, without his property that supports his existence? There are time caps for each of these things. Imagine if prison sentences didn't define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep extending the duration beyond a defined limit.

paddy_m 2y ago

I once heard of a behavioral economics paper that said you can reliably predict a judge's ruling on a legal or ethics matter based on what is best for the legal profession.

giantg2 2y ago
This is why judicial records are so secret that you can't even subpoena exculpatory evidence from them. They want to protect the image of the judicial system. So old fashioned. In today's world, you build trust with transparency... assuming your organization isn't rotten...
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  I challenge this kind of thinking. Why haven't other highly developed democracies decayed in the same way? Wouldn't all judges, everywhere, behave in the same way?
  - giantg2 2y ago
    What actions do you have in mind? Where are those actions happening or not? How do you think the decay of democracy is tied to judicial secrecy/immunity?

mattmaroon 2y ago

It would not be up to the police to define but a court. And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can. Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.

OutOfHere 2y ago
That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual. Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the current status of indefinite asset seizure being essentially the law of the land everywhere. Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc. You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional. It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary. This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.

exabrial 2y ago

Baby steps though, progress not perfection. None of your points are invalid

lokar 2y ago

IANAL, but I don’t think they are supposed to. They decide the case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but that’s not authoritative. We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.

lucianbr 2y ago
> We will have to wait I seem to remember something about "justice delayed". Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  More like "this is how you creep in justice". You set a date and politicians will spend months determining what's too long/too short. Or in this case, the judges may not get a unanimous ruling as easily. The article mentions that this is a DC appeals court that establishes this, and several other circuits have rules otherwise. The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court case to set precedent on what is "too long" and use that as a reference for future court cases. Or in this case, it may in fact go to the supreme court who will be able to determine a more concrete time (or just throw it all away and doom us all).
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    Given the prior majority of appeals courts deciding the other way, it seems like something of a waste of time to figure out a time period. Better to say "you can't hold it for an unreasonable period, and 14 months was unreasonable" It will have to be resolved at the Supreme Court level anyway, given the US Court of Appeals split.
    - rodgerd 2y ago

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That’s why a reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.

OutOfHere 2y ago
Exemptions for edge cases would benefit only the government. Moreover, the exemptions would take away the individual's rights even more, which is exactly what the citizenry need to guard against.

userbinator 2y ago

Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap. For many serious crimes, they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment

nimbius 2y ago

I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3 months. Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice. Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused. Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back. Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.

giantg2 2y ago
Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being tried, and without the protections of the criminal system). On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
- sneak 2y ago
  If you don’t consent to searches, cops that want to search you will either simply search you illegally anyway, or call out dogs that are trained to alert whenever the cops want them to. There’s a reason that K-9 units are called “probable cause on four legs”.
  - EasyMark 2y ago
    Not true, I have refused a “look over”of my car for two traffic stops, both cops threatened canine cops and I told them go ahead. One radioed in “not available”, The other one went back to his car and wrote me a ticket and told me I was lucky he got another call while he was filling out the ticket. I’m sure they sometimes do “do it anyway” but it isn’t a sure thing.
    - bluGill 2y ago

giantg2 2y ago

There is a cap implied. The only reasonable reason to hold the property is for evidence. Once the statue of limitation runs out, or the appeals process is exhausted, there is no reasonable reason to hold the property anymore.

gist 2y ago

> but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling. Not always correct as a principle. To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more. For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case'. Anyway to the point how much would people think is 'reasonable'? 10 years - no way 5 years - no way (unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial) 1 year - probably not 1 month - might be to short ... and so on. I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the 'last minute' with timing and so on.

solidsnack9000 2y ago

One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation, as you mention; but judges don't write legislation. There is a way the rules develop as "common law" -- via judicial decisions -- but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up through several cases that cover different situations. For example: - There would be cases where a person's medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days. - There would be cases where a person's groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks. - And so on. It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.

IG_Semmelweiss 2y ago

This is a good point. I've always thought a constitutional amendment to make every law in the books auto sunset, unless explicitly voted in by congress I would think this would have made the PATRIOT ACT obsolete some time ago, among other things

shkkmo 2y ago
The Patriot act was reauthorized (in part) several times, but expired in 2020.

lr4444lr 2y ago

It's not useless at all. It provides the framework for lawyers all across the nation to contest property detentions on a case by case basis, some will find sympathetic judgments, and the facts behind the case law results will be cited and reused in further rulings.

backtoyoujim 2y ago

https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-serving-prisoners-tales-of-incarceration-without-end-efc930b198d7 https://medium.com/exploring-history/7-worlds-longest-servin... "James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with an additional 3,318 years" The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US

fencepost 2y ago
I suspect that this pattern for sentencing is so that even if some charges/convictions are reversed the remaining sentence makes that reversal not really significant in real-world terms.

porknubbins 2y ago

It is very common to naively think laws should be rewritten to be clearer but experience quickly shows why that doesn’t work. Basically laws can only work when they are interpreted by reasonable jurists because the real world is full of grey areas and human language is not clear enough to fully divide the space of “everything that can happen in the world” into clear legal and illegal categories. In programming terms, an appeal’s court deciding an exact number of days police can confiscate property is like hard coding in a global constant that then can never be changed, deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that, which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of the file that people see and can have input into.

lobochrome 2y ago

How does a judge get rich?

hansvm 2y ago

With qualified immunity on the books, if the police reach into your car and steal something important then you're out of luck. I'm not optimistic that better definitions around this particular method of theft would have any effect at all on the fruits of that power imbalance.

photonthug 2y ago

> This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich The best part is the insulting pretense that it’s all very rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it’s convenient. If you watch kids often enough you’ll occasionally observe the kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding fair play, etc. These bully’s become lawyers instead of cops. The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that it’s easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting impacts. It’s all so fragile.

datavirtue 2y ago

I think a lot of your complaint is a result of too many laws. Why don't we establish principles instead of trying to nail down every edge case. It's the edge cases that enrich the legal profession and leave the law open to abuse. All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to punish a certain individual or company (tiktok). It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the intent.

maxwell 2y ago

Maybe civil law is objectively superior to common law.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago

I immediately thought of the same thing. They'll stop retaining seized property indefinitely and start retaining it for 7 decades instead.

germandiago 2y ago

I am no lawyer or something like that. I think the full topic must be much more complex than that. However, I agree there should be a lot of simplification and there is a lot of overregulation and contradictions.

that_guy_iain 2y ago

> This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it back after 14 days. It however does provide the very useful definition of why it can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for retaining it.

LorenPechtel 2y ago

I don't think it's remotely practical to have a hard limit because what's entirely reasonable in some cases is entirely unreasonable in others. Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break that limit they automatically become liable for replacement with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.

vdqtp3 2y ago
> The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic. They'd be paying for it with our money. Standard economic drives don't affect organizations that are funded with someone else's money.

jknoepfler 2y ago

Judges are rich?