FOLLOWING THE MONEY

Many good lawyers find themselves representing a client or a cause that
they personally find distasteful, even offensive. Often, they do the job
well enough to win.

That's their professional duty, and attorneys should be praised for doing
it. Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff and his staff deserve that praise
for winning a clear victory for a law that they never liked and are still
working to change.

Shurtleff knows his duty and he knows the law. It is too bad that he is
still a little fuzzy about why the law he defended is better than he
realizes, and why some of the changes he wants are destined to undermine
the public's faith in the legal system.

The law is called Initiative B. It was passed hands down by the voters in
2000, and its goal is to see to it that any cash or property seized from
alleged drug dealers goes to the state's education fund, not to the law
enforcement agencies that seized it.

When prosecutors in Salt Lake, Davis and Weber counties kept some seized
money, claiming that another state statue allowed them to do so, and the
state auditor's office called them on it, Shurtleff sued. Last week, he
won. For now, seized drug assets belong to the state.

All the while, though, Shurtleff and his deputies continue to not only
lament the loss of these assets from the war on drugs, but also to deeply
resent the implication that neither they nor the system is trustworthy
enough to ensure, without Initiative B, that nobody's rights are being
debauched.

That is an understandable point of pride for these officers of the court.
But all law is based on the understanding that human beings are not wholly
trustworthy and often need to have clear boundaries set out. The mere
existence of a mechanism that gives to an agency the property that it
seizes, makes everyone who serves that agency suspect and places everything
they do under a cloud.

The point of Initiative B is that a human agency that is financially
rewarded for enforcing certain laws will not only give priority to that
enforcement, but be tempted to play fast and loose with civil rights and
due process in order to reap those rewards. While there are no documented
cases of abuses in the pursuit of drug money in Utah, the fact that drug
asset seizures have dropped since Initiative B passed strongly supports the
notion that prosecutors follow the money.

It is true that drug task forces don't have the money or the manpower to
have a hope of rivaling the wealthy drug lords they pursue. But the
solution for them, as for all underfunded bureaucracies, is to approach the
Legislature and request more funding.

If funding the drug war is really so important, the Legislature should come
through. Because public faith in the judicial system is at least as
important to the drug war as all the cash in the world.