Pubdate: Sun, 21 Jan 2001
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2001 The Kansas City Star
Contact: letters@kcstar.com
Address: 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108
Feedback: http://www.kansascity.com/Discussion/
Website: http://www.kcstar.com/
Author: Karen Dillon, The Kansas City Star
Cited: Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation http://www.drugpolicy.org/
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation http://www.cjpf.org/
Referenced: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n103/a05.html
Bookmark: MAP's link to all of Karen Dillon's outstanding forfeiture articles:
http://www.mapinc.org/authors/dillon+karen
Bookmarks: http://www.mapinc.org/af.htm (Asset Forfeiture)
http://www.mapinc.org/find?178 (Ashcroft, John)

ASHCROFT'S STANCE ON SEIZED ASSETS DRAWS SCRUTINY

John Ashcroft is attracting criticism from drug war opponents who say he
turned a blind eye while police were violating the Missouri Constitution at
the time he was governor.

A 1990 state Supreme Court ruling upheld the constitution, which said drug
money that police seize must go to education, and overturned a state law
that Ashcroft had signed in 1986 allowing police to keep the money. But
police in Missouri, with help from the U.S. Department of Justice,
continued to route the money back to their departments.

"As governor of Missouri, John Ashcroft ignored the dictates of his own
state constitution in allowing money to be diverted from public education
to his state Highway Patrol," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of
the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, a nonprofit group that pushes
for drug law reform, in a statement issued Friday.

"When it comes to making sure federal agencies don't aid and abet the
trampling of state law, Attorney General Ashcroft would be the proverbial
fox guarding the chicken coop."

But some who worked with Ashcroft as governor said he never addressed the
Supreme Court ruling, which may not have attracted his attention.

Richard McClure, his chief of staff at the time, said he did not remember
the court's ruling or a conflict between education and law enforcement
officials.

"To me, drug forfeiture was an issue of, `We're finally going to be able to
use productively, for law enforcement needs, these resources that are being
seized,' " McClure said. "I do not recall a controversy at the time."

During the past decade, Missouri police and the Highway Patrol went on to
work with federal agencies to keep millions of dollars in drug money they
seized.

Ashcroft's office did not return phone calls Thursday and Friday. Ashcroft
has not responded to requests for interviews about forfeiture for more than
a year and a half, even though as a U.S. senator he was a member of the
Judiciary Committee, which last year worked on a reform bill.

In a column published Thursday in the Los Angeles Times, Arianna
Huffington, a political activist, called Ashcroft's role after the court
decision "troubling."

"Ashcroft allowed his state police to keep the proceeds from forfeited drug
assets that were supposed to go to public schools," she wrote.

Eric Sterling, a criminal justice analyst and president of the Criminal
Justice Policy Foundation, said the history of forfeiture in Missouri
highlighted concerns that Ashcroft will not enforce laws he disagrees with
if he becomes attorney general.

"It's significant and it's of great importance about what it may say about
his sensitivity to honoring a Supreme Court when he is the chief
executive," Sterling said. "One would think a Supreme Court ruling that
dealt with the funds of the state would be very carefully followed by any
chief executive."

But Raymond Wagner, Ashcroft's counsel in the early 1990s, said he didn't
think Ashcroft played any role in the forfeiture controversy.

"I have no recollection of that, so it leads me to believe there was no
discussion about that matter," Wagner said. "I would bet it never happened."

Chip Robertson, who was a judge on the Supreme Court when it ruled in 1990,
said that he was unaware of Ashcroft's position on forfeiture at the time
but that the legal situation was ambiguous. It appeared then that law
enforcement officers could choose to take forfeitures to the state or to
federal agencies.

"Anytime you have dual jurisdiction, then federal and state law collide,"
Robertson said.

In 1993, after Ashcroft had left office, the Missouri General Assembly
passed a law that prohibited police from taking seized drug money straight
to a federal agency.