THE PIRATE STATE

Under a Supreme Court ruling, if authorities think that property might have,
at some time, been used in a crime, it can be seized - no warrant required.
Almost as predictably as the cycle of the tides, the U.S. Supreme Court has
again ruled against the need for police to obtain a warrant before seizing
property. It is not hyperbole to suggest that exceptions to the Fourth
Amendment's warrant requirement may soon completely subvert the rule,
stripping away the protection from arbitrary police power most valued by the
nation's founders.

The most recent disappointing verdict came out of a Florida case. This week,
the Supreme Court ruled that vehicles believed to have been used to commit a
crime can be confiscated by police without a warrant.

Tyvessel Tyvorus White reportedly was observed by police in the summer of
1993 using his car to sell and deliver cocaine. Inexplicably, White was not
arrested then, nor was his car confiscated. It wasn't until months later,
after White was arrested on unrelated charges, that his car was seized
without a warrant.

When the car was taken, it had been safely parked in White's employer's
parking lot in Bay County. There were no emergency conditions that would
have justified a warrantless seizure; the car was immobile, and its owner
was in police custody. Officers had no fear for their safety and no reason
to think the car would be driven away and cause them to lose their evidence.
Those are the kinds of reasons that typically justify confiscating a car
without a court order.

After the car was taken, police conducted a routine search of the vehicle
and found two pieces of crack cocaine in the dashboard ashtray. Florida's

Supreme Court threw out White's drug possession conviction in February 1998,
ruling that the car was seized illegally and, therefore, anything found in
the car could not be used as evidence. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned
that judgment, effectively reinstating White's conviction.

The high court justified the warrantless seizure by saying the car was
itself contraband, which makes it always available for seizure. And, the
justices ruled, because the car was sitting in a public place, no privacy
rights were violated in taking it.

This logic vests so much discretion in the police that it virtually swallows
the Fourth Amendment whole. Under the court's rationale, the state can
designate an otherwise legal product such as a car as contraband based
purely on the belief that the car was used in a crime sometime in the past.
The state can then take the car without any judicial oversight, even though
the seizure will benefit the government financially.

This is a recipe for constitutional disaster. Police have been known to take
cars, boats and cash on the basis of little if any evidence of their
criminal use. Such seizures have become a lucrative augmentation of many
departments' law enforcement budgets. This case will only encourage more
such abuse.

In insisting police obtain a warrant before seizing White's car, the Florida
Supreme Court had said that a state forfeiture statute cannot negate
individual rights. "It would, indeed, be a Pyrrhic victory for the country
if the government's imaginative use of that weapon (civil forfeiture) were
to leave the Constitution itself a casualty," the Florida court said,
quoting a federal appeals court.

With its ruling this week, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken that dire
prediction one step closer to the truth.