Terry Dehko and his daughter Sandy Thomas (pictured) run a grocery store in Fraser, Michigan. It sells everything from bread to hand-made sausages. Fairly often, someone takes cash from the till and puts it in the bank across the street. Deposits are nearly always less than $10,000, because the insurance covers the theft of cash only up to that sum.
In January, without warning, the government seized all the money in the shop account: more than $35,000. The charge was that the Dehkos had violated federal money-laundering rules, which forbid people to “structure” their bank deposits so as to avoid the $10,000 threshold that triggers banks to report a transaction to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
Prosecutors offered no evidence that the Dehkos were laundering money or dodging tax. Indeed, the IRS gave their business a clean bill of health last year. But still, the Dehkos cannot get their cash back.
[blockquote] In criminal cases, the government can confiscate assets only after a conviction. Under “civil forfeitureâ€, however, it can grab first and ask questions later. Property can be seized merely on the suspicion that it has been involved in a crime. …In many civil-forfeiture cases the agencies that seize the assets keep most of the proceeds, and can use them to pad their budgets or buy faster patrol cars. It is hard to know how common this is, but the Institute for Justice notes that the federal government shared $450m of seized assets with state and local authorities in 2012. [/blockquote]
It’s extremely common, it’s a blatant violation of the Constitution, and it keeps being upheld in court after court. Basically, some government representative (at any level of government) shows up and takes something incredibly valuable from you and you can’t get it back. And there needs to be little proof, if any, that you were involved in criminal wrongdoing. Let’s say your nephew, whom you trust, borrows your car and then gets caught using it to deliver drugs. The car is seized and you’re SOL because you will probably never see it again in this world. But it could be your house, or it could just be large amounts of cash that you own perfectly legally. Depending on your economic status, this could be totally devastating for you. Then the asset is sold and the seizers divvy up the profits among themselves. Nice racket. If any lawyer can explain why this is not blatantly illegal I’d love to hear it.
Civil forfeiture is blatantly unconstitutional. I cannot understand how it keeps being upheld in courts.
I read the article with incredulity. Deeply, deeply unfair and the whole system tilted in favour of bureaucracy. I thought that the U.S. had a Constitution and a Bill of Rights. Evidently I was mistaken.