DRUG MONEY?

Welcome to the World of Civil Asset Forfeiture: Enriching the Local
Police at Your Expense

Even if you're a law-abiding citizen who's never been convicted of a
crime, local police are allowed to confiscate your property and money
and keep up to 80 percent of it for themselves, with the legal
stipulation that this windfall be spent only on programs likely to
result in additional confiscations where the police can keep up to 80
percent of the booty for themselves.

That's addressed to you. And it's no joke.

"The money can only be used for the police department ... it gets
recycled back into drug work [and] it can't supplant normally
budgeted items," says Detective Tom Gameli, who handles these
confiscations for the West Hartford police department.

The police in West Hartford had a profitable year; at the last
council meeting on Sept. 25, a resolution passed that moved close to
$180,000 in money made from property taken in forfeiture cases in
West Hartford, into the local drug enforcement fund.

But the cops can't just sit back and wait for fate to shower them
with such largess, Gameli said. "For us to get the money, we have to
seize the stuff."

He's talking about asset forfeiture, one of the more devastating
weapons in the government's drug war arsenal. The rationale behind it
sounds sensible enough: if you make money from criminal activities,
you shouldn't get to keep your ill-gotten gains. And whether you
agree with the law or not, intoxicants other than alcohol are
illegal, so money made from the sale of such is (legally) fair game
for confiscation.

But so is anything else that has any involvement with drug activity.
If you want to buy a joint, you can lose the car you drove to make
the deal. The same holds true if a friend or spouse borrows your car
for the same purpose. The confiscated car is sold at auction, and the
police force that nabbed it gets to keep 70 or 80 percent of the
proceeds, depending upon the car's value.

"Most of the money we get from state asset forfeiture, because the
feds have higher [monetary] standards," Gameli said. "If you're gonna
take a house, you go through the feds, if you take $250 from a
knucklehead on the street, you go state ... the federal threshold is
$2,000 for cash, $5,000 for cars." If it's a federal case the town
police get to keep 80 percent of the proceeds, but they only get 70
percent on the state level.

"We've done polls," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the
Drug Policy Alliance. "Two things about asset forfeiture the public
dislikes: first, that when cops and prosecutors seize property they
get to keep it for their own departments, the public finds that
corrupting ... and second, that you could lose your property without
a criminal conviction."

How can the government take your money or property if you haven't
been convicted of a crime? "These are civil cases," Gameli said, and
they differ from criminal ones. "It bolsters the case if he's
convicted [of a crime]," Gameli said, but "a civil case has a lower
standard of proof ... I know of cases where the guy walked on the
charges, but still lost his car or his money."

Bruce Mirken of the Marijuana Policy Project finds that disturbing.
"What he's saying, it sounds like, is that he thinks it's just fine
for the government to take property from people who have been found
innocent of the alleged crime ... In what parallel universe is that
fair, just or reasonable?"

Calling these "civil" cases implies that they are reviewed by the
courts, but that's not necessarily true.

"Generally speaking ... approximately 80 percent or more of civil
forfeiture cases are not contested," says Allen St. Pierre, executive
director of NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana
Laws). This is in part because contesting the process can cost more
than the value of what's been confiscated.

"The average vehicle seized is worth about $4,000," said Brenda
Grantland, president of FEAR (Forfeiture Endangers American Rights).
"To defend a case, especially when you're out of state, they've
pretty much made it cost prohibitive. I don't take cases of less than
$20,000 .. it'll cost more than that to defend it." Neither Gameli
nor the DEA could say what percentage of their confiscations came
from people actually convicted of a crime, or from folks who lost
in-court civil cases.

Remember Gameli's hypothetical "knucklehead" who enriched the local
constabulary? Chances are he had drugs on him too. But not
necessarily -- under asset forfeiture laws, the simple possession of
cash, with no drugs or other contraband, can be considered evidence
of criminal activity.

You'll find no shortage of examples throughout the country. Two
recent examples, chosen only because they're so unremarkable, are as
follows: in October 2006, two men driving through Davidson County,
North Carolina, were stopped by sheriff's deputies and found to have
$88,000 hidden in their car. The men told the sheriffs they were on
their way to buy a house in Atlanta. Although no drugs were found,
the sheriffs confiscated the money anyway. And just last August, a
truck driver at a weigh station in El Paso had $23,700 confiscated;
once again, no drugs or contraband were found, but the cash led to an
assumption of guilt.

Naturally, police and the DEA insist they're not infringing upon the
rights of innocent people. "The police won't take [the money] if they
have a good excuse," says Steve Robertson, a DEA spokesman down in
D.C., when asked about cases like the one in El Paso. "I would assume
he was listed in a database where he might be drug-related."

"Databases contain errors," said Mirken. "Just look at the TSA's
no-fly list, which at one point almost kept Sen. Edward Kennedy off a
flight as a suspected terrorist ... the idea that government should
be able to simply take a person's money, house or car without having
to prove the person did anything wrong is obscene."

Allen St. Pierre says that in such cases, "the onus and total burden
is entirely on the citizen/business to disprove the government's
case" in such situations.

Robertson of the DEA agrees. If you can prove the money wasn't
acquired illegally, then the police won't take it.

But that leads to a problem. Say that every week when you cash your
paycheck you stick a $100 bill in a coffee can. If the police want to
confiscate this cash years later, the onus should be on them to prove
the money is illegal, because you might not be able to prove it isn't.

"Property rights are not considered as important as personal liberty,
so due process is often reduced," Grantland said. "We've been
fighting for years to get [asset forfeiture] under control, but
there's no way it'll go away because the government gets too much
money doing it."

Even proving where you got the money might not save you, Grantland
said. "Some victims called us a few years ago ... he'd just won a
medical malpractice settlement ... he and his friends, low-income
black guys, decided to go to Las Vegas [and] got as far as Plano,
Texas. It got confiscated. They even showed them the settlement ... I
don't know if they ever got their money back."

West Hartford probably has a few residents who like to smoke the
occasional unlicensed cigarette behind closed doors. And from the
cops' perspective, there's a lot of money to be made cracking down on
these criminals. So one of the items on the agenda at last week's
town council meeting said this: "Resolution appropriating drug asset
forfeiture money in the Drug Enforcement Fund."

The measure passed unanimously. Deputy Mayor Art Spada was not in
attendance, but Mayor Scott Slifka and all seven members of the council were.

Do the council members know that some of that windfall money could
have been confiscated from folks who were not found guilty of any
crimes? We sent an e-mail asking "do you, as elected officials, have
any Constitutional and/or ethical qualms about the police
confiscating property from town residents who were not convicted of a crime?"

As of press time, four days later, none had responded.