October 31, 2006
Creeping Totalitarianism Department
The New Tax Collectors
You know how in the Bible the lowest of the low are the tax collectors? I'm no theologian, but I'm pretty sure that's because tax collectors at the time weren't the dreary government bureaucrats we're all used to. They were armed men who came and took people's stuff, often with little law behind them and even less reason.
The D'Alliance refers us to a story in the Daily Record of Morris County, New Jersey:
The Morris County Prosecutor's Office has filed a lawsuit to take control of 11 vehicles and $30,219 seized from suspects during its Operation Painkiller crackdown in July on the use and sale of Oxycodone by young people.
The forfeiture lawsuit, made public Thursday in state Superior Court, Morristown, asks a judge to terminate any property rights the owners have to the money or vehicles because the cash and cars allegedly were obtained through, or used in furtherance of, criminal activity.
The lawsuit targets three vehicles owned by Gerard and Jane Trapp of Whippany. Their 19-year-old son, Gerard Trapp Jr., was one of about 58 young people arrested on or around July 27 in drug raids. Trapp Jr. has resolved a conspiracy to possess Oxycodone charge by being enrolled -- without admitting any wrongdoing -- into the county's Pre-Trial Intervention probationary program for first-time offenders.
In other words, the prosecutor's office wants to take all this stuff even though they haven't proven a crime has occurred. This is not just one crazy prosecutor's bizarre twist to the law. It's something called civil forfeiture, and it happens all the time.
Say you get caught selling drugs. The cops arrest you and take the drugs. Even if you beat the charge, or plea it down, or arrange for some kind of non-punitive intervention, the cops aren't going to give back the drugs. It's the same if they take burglary tools or a murder weapon. These things are the tools of a crime, even if no crime is proven.
Law enforcement—and the legislatures that enable them—have been extending this idea to cover other less-obvious tools of the crime, most notably cars, cash, and homes. If you sell drugs out of your home, the police might take it. If you try to hire a prostitute from your car, and she turns out to be a policewoman, they can take your car. If you have cash on you that you might have used or earned in a crime, they can take your cash.
Civil forfeiture apologists claim this is no different from taking drugs or burglary tools or murder weapons, but they're wrong because of one crucial difference: When the police take dope or burglary tools or guns, they eventually destroy them. But when the cops take someone's car, they use it. When they take someone's cash, they spend it. When they take someone's house, they sell it.
This is one of the most blatantly unconstitutional things that the Supreme Court allows police to get away with. The constitution plainly states that private property cannot be taken for public use without compensation. Destroying the tools of a crime is one thing, but simply taking them and selling them to get the cash can't be right. Not without ever proving a crime has occurred.
And they do get to keep the cash. In almost all states, some or all of the proceeds from the forfeiture will eventually end up in the police budget. This means that the police department has a material stake in the the arrest. Rather than being disinterested investigators, they have a chance to make money.
This inevitably leads to distortion of law enforcement goals. Take down a drug kingpin who owns nothing on paper, you get nothing but the arrest. But take down a kid growing pot in his parents' basement, you just might get yourself a house. Take down 19-year old kid with a bottle of prescription-only painkillers in his pocket, you can get every car he drove in.
(In this case, the charge is actually "conspiracy to possess" which sounds like he may not actually have had any drugs, but was just trying to find a drug deal. I don't really know.)
[Trapp family attorney Timothy] Smith argued that the family, including Gerard Trapp Sr., to whom the four family cars are registered to, were unaware of the younger Gerard's activities in three of the cars.
"To seek to have the people buy back their own cars when they need those cars for their daily activities seems to me to almost rise to the level of extortion," Smith said.
Men with weapons come and take their stuff and demand money to get it back. It is extortion. They can hide behind legal proceedings and explanations, but police departments doing civil forfeiture are the modern equivalent of Biblical tax collectors.
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