"War On Drugs" Atrocities: The Forfeiture Laws/02

 Message #16732 - U_BBS 

   Date : 12-Aug-91 12:36

   From : Unknown

     To : All

Subject : "War On Drugs" Atrocities: The Forfeiture Laws/02

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AREA:U_BBS

@SPLIT: 14 Aug 91 16:44:20 @120/183       535 02/03 +++++++++++

@PTH 1:120/183.0@fidonet

Judy Mulford, 31, and her 13-year old twins, Chris, left, and Jason,

are down to essentials in their Lake Park, Fla., home, which the

government took in 1989 after claiming her husband, Joseph, stored

cocaine there. Neither parent has been criminally charge, but in April

a forfeiture jury said Mrs. Mulford must forfeit the house she bought

herself with an insurance settlement. The Mulfords have divorced, and

she has sold most of her belongings to cover legal bills. She's asked

for a new trial and lives in the near-empty house pending a decision. } 

'Looking' like a criminal

Ethel Hylton of New York City has yet to regain her financial

independence after losing $39,110 in a search nearly three years ago

in Hobby Airport in Houston. 

Shortly after she arrived from New York, a Houston officer and

Drug Enforcement Administration agent stopped the 46-year-old woman in

the baggage area and told her she was under arrest because a drug dog

had scratched at her luggage. The dog wasn't with them, and when Miss

Hylton asked to see it, the officers refused to bring it out. 

The agents searched her bags, and ordered a strip search of

Miss Hylton, but found no contraband. 

In her purse they found the cash Miss Hylton carried because

she planned to buy a house to escape the New York winters which

exasperated her diabetes. It was the settlemet from an insurance

claim, and her life's savings, gatherd through more than 20 years of

work as a hotle housekeeper and hospital night janitor. 

The police seized all but $10 of the cash and sent Miss Hylton

on her way, keeping the money bacause of its alleged drug connection.

But they never charged her with a crime. 

The Pittsburgh Press verified her jobs, reviewed her bank

statements and substantiated her claim she had $18,000 from an

insurance settlement. It also found no criminal record for her in New

York City. 

With the mix of outrage and resignation voiced by other

victims of searches, she says: "The money they took was mine. I'm

allowed to have it. I earned it."

Miss Hylton bacame a U.S. citizen six years ago. She asks,

"Why did they stop me? Is it bacause I'm black or bacause I'm

Jamaican?"

Probably, both -- although Houston police haven't said.

Drug teams interviewed in dozens of airports, train stations

and bus terminals and along other major highways repeatedly said they

didn't stop travellers based on race. But a Pittsburgh Press

examination of 121 travellers' cases in which police found no dope,

made no arrest, but seized money anyway showed that 77 percent of the

people stopped were black, Hispanc, or Asian. 

In April, 1989, deputies from Jefferson Davis Parish,

Louisiana, seized $23,000 from Johnny Sotello, a Mexican-American

whose truck overheated on a highway. 

They offered help, he accepted. They asked to search his

truch. He agreed. They asked if he was carrying cash. He said he was

because he was scouting heavy equipment auctions. 

They then pulled a door panel from the truck, said the space

behind it could have hidden drugs, and seized the money and the truck,

court records show. Police did not arrest Sotello but told him he

would have to go to court to recover his property. 

Sotello sent auctioneer's receipts to police which showed he

was a licensed buyer. the sherriff offered to settle the case, and

with his legal bills mounting after two years, Sotello accepted. In a

deal cut last March, he got his truck, but only half his money. The

cops kept $11,500.

i was more afraid of the banks than anything -- that's one

reason I carry cash," says Sotello. "But a lot of places won't take

checks, only cash, or cashier's checks for the exact amount. I never

heard of anybody saying you couldn't carry cash."

Affadavits show the same deputy who stopped Sotello routinely

stopped the cars or balck and Hispanic drivers, exacting "donations"

from some. 

After another of the deputy's stops, two black men from

Atlanta handed over $1,000 for a "drug fund" after being detained for

hours, according to a hand-written receipt reviewed by the Pittsburgh

Press. 

The driver got a ticket for "following to (sic) close." Back

home, they got a lawyer. 

Their attorney, in a letter to the Sherrif's department, said

deputies had made the men "fear for their safety, and in direct

exploitation of tha fear a purported donation of $1000 was

extracted..."

If they "were kind enough to give the money to the sherrif's

office," the letter said, "hen you can be kind enough to give it

back." If they gave the money "under other circumstances, then give

the money back so we can avoid litigation." 

Six days later, the sherrif's department mailed the men a

$1,000 check. 

Last year, the 72 deputies of Jefferson Davis Parish led the

state in forfeitures, gatering $1 million -- more than their

colleagues in New Orleans, a city 17 times larger than the parish. 

Like most states, Louisiana returns the money to law

enforcement agencies, but it has one of the more unusual

distributions:60 percent goes to the police bringing a case, 20

percent to the district attorney's office prosecuting it and 20

percent to the court fund of the judge signing the forfeiture order. 

"The highway stops aren't much different from a smash-and-grab

ring," says Lorenzi, of the Louisiana Defense Lawyers association.

Paying for your innocence

The Justice Department's Terwilliger says that in some cases

"dumb judgement" may ocaasionally cause problems, but he believes

there is an adequate solution. "That's why we have courts."

But the notion that courts are a safeguard for citizens

wrongly accused "is way off," says Tjomas Kerner, a forfeiture lawyer

in Boston. "Compared to forfeiture, David and Goliath was a fair

fight."

Starting from the moment that the government serves notice

that it intends to take an item, until any court challenge is

completed, "the government gets all the breaks," says Kerner. 

The government need only show probable cause for a seizure, a

standard no greater than what is needed to get a search warrant. The

lower standard means the government can take a home without any more

evidence than it normally needs to tkae a look inside. 

Clients who challenge the government, says attorney Edward

Hinson of Charlotte, N.C., "have the choice of fighting the full

resources of the U.S. treasury or caving in."

Barry Colin caved in.

Kolin watched Portland, Ore., police padlock the doors of

Harvey's, his bar and restaurant for bookmaking on March 2.

Earlier that day, eight police officers and Amy Holmes Hehn,

the Multnomah County deputy district attorney, had swept into the bar,

shooed out waitresses and customers and arrested Mike Kolin, Barry's

brother and bartender, on suspicion of bookmaking.

Nothing in the police documents mentioned Barry Kolin, and so

the 40-year-old was stunned when authorities took his business, saying

they believe he knew about the betting. He denied it. 

Hehn concedes she did not have the evidence to press a

criminal case against Barry Kolin, "so we seized the business

civilly."

During a recess in a hearing on the seizures weeks later, "the

deputy DA says if I paid them $30,000 I could open up again," Kolin

recalls. When the deal dropped to $10,000, Kolin took it. 

Kolin's lawyer, Jenny Cooke, calls the seizure "extortion."

She says: "There is no difference between what the police did to Barry

Kolin or what Al Capone did in Chicago when he walked in and said,

'This is a nice little bar and it's mine.' the only difference is

today they call this civil forfeiture." 

Minor crimes, major penalties

Forfeiture's tremendous clout helps make it "one of the most

effective tools that we have," says Terwilliger.

the clout, though, puts property owners at risk of losing more

under forfeiture that they would in a criminal case under the same

circumstances. 

Criminal charges in federal and many state courts carry

maximum sentences. But there's no dollar cap on forfeiture, leaving

citizens open to punishment that far exceeds the crime. 

Robert Brewer of Irwin, Idaho, is dying of prostate cancer,

and uses marijuana to ease the pain and nausea that comes with

radiation treatments.

Last Oct. 10, a dozen deputies and Idaho tax agents walked

into the Brewer's living room with guns drawn and said they had a

warrant to search.

The Brewers, Robert, 61, and Bonita, 44, both retired form the

postal service, moved from Kansas City, Mo., to the tranquil, wooded

valley of Irwin in 1989. Six months later, he was diagnosed. 

According to police reports, and informant told authorities

Brewer ran a major marijuana operation. 

The drug SWAT team found eight plants in the basement under a

grow light and a half-pound of marijuana. The Brewers were charged

with two felony narcotics counts and two charges for failing to buy

state tax stamps for the dope.

"I didn't like the idea of the marijuana, but it was the only

thing that controlled his pain," Mrs. Brewer says.

The government seized the couples five-year-old Ford van that

allowed him to lie down during his twice-a-month trips for cancer

treatment at a Salt Lake City hospital, 270 miles away. 

Now they must go by car.

"That's a long painful ride for him. His testicles would

sometimes swell up to the size of cantaloupes, and he had to lie down

because of the pain. He needed that van, and the government took it,"

Mrs. Brewer says. 

"It looks like the government can punish people any way it

sees fit."

The Brewers know nothing about the informant who turned them

in, but informants play a big role in forfeiture. Many of them are

paid, targeting property in return for a cut of anything that is

taken. 

The Justice Department's asset forfeiture fund paid $24

million to informants in 1990 and has $22 million allocated this year.

Private citizens who snith for a fee are everywhere. Some

airline counter clerks receive cash awards for alerting drug agents to

"suspicious" travellers. The practice netted Melissa Furtner, a

Continental Airlines clerk in Denver, at least $5,800 between 1989 and

1990, photocopies of checks show. 

Increased surveillance, recruitment of citizen-cops, and

expantion of forfeiture sweeps are all part of a take-now,

litigate-later syndrome that builds prosecutors careers, says a former

federal prosecutor. 

"Fedreal law enforcement people are the most ambitious I've

ever met, and to get ahead they need visible results. Visible results

are convictions, and, now, forfeitures," says Don Lewis of Meadville,

Crawford County. (ED: a Pa county north of Pgn by two counties.)

Lewis spent 17 years as a prosecutor, serving as an assistant

U.S. attorney in Tampa as recently as 1988. He left the Tampa Job --

and became a defense lawyer -- when "I found myslef tempted to do

things I wouldn't have thought about doing years ago."

Terwilliger insists U.S. attorneys would never be evaluated on

"something as unprofessional as dollars."

Which is not to say Justice doesn't watch the bottom line.

Cary Copeland, director of the department' Executive Office

for Asset Forfeiture, says the tried to "squeeze the pipeline" in 1990

when the amount forfeited lagged behind Justice's budget projections.

He said this was done by speeding up the process, not by doing

"whole lot of seizures."

Ending the Abuse

While defense lawyers talk of reforming the law, agencies that

initiate forfeiture scarcely talk at all. 

DEA headquarters makes a spectacle of busts like the seizure

of fraternity houses at the University of Virginia in March. But it

refuses to supply detailed information on the small cases that account

for most of its activity. 

Local prosecutors are just as tight-lipped.

Thomas Corbett, U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania, seals

court documents on forfeitures because "there are just some things I

don't want to publicize. the person whose assets we seize will

eventually know, and who else has to?"

Although some investigations need to be protected, there is an

--- Fred-Uf 1.8h(L)[BETA]

 * Origin: Royaljok.Fidonet.Org - Usenet Gateway (1:120/183.0)

@PID: FredMail 1.8-BETA

@PATH: 30499/1000 120/183 2202/3 

@