New Mexico Legislators Sue City For Refusing To Follow New Asset Forfeiture Law
from the we-thought-it-was-just-a-suggestion dept
Earlier this year, the state of New Mexico passed one of the most solid pieces of asset forfeiture reform legislation in the country. All it asked for was what most people would consider to be common sense: if the government is going to seize assets, the least it could do in return is tie the seizure to a conviction.
Now, the state is finding out that bad habits are hard to break. CJ Ciaramella reports that the government is going after another part of the government for its refusal to stop taking stuff without securing a conviction.
Two New Mexico state senators are suing Albuquerque after the city has refused to stop seizing residents’ cars, despite a law passed earlier this year ending the practice of civil asset forfeiture.These would be the two senators who pushed for the much-needed reform. They managed to get the law passed, but Albuquerque (along with other cities in the state) haven't shown much interest in altering their tactics. The only incentive the new law has on its side is the threat of legal action or legislative pressure. The old incentives -- hundreds of thousands of dollars -- are still motivating local law enforcement.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, New Mexico state senators Lisa Torraco and Daniel Ivey-Soto said Albuquerque is defying the new law and “has continued to take property using civil forfeiture without requiring that anyone—much less the property owner—be convicted of a crime.”
Albuquerque has a particularly aggressive program to seize vehicles from drivers suspected of DWI. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the city has seized 8,369 vehicles and collected more than $8.3 million in forfeiture revenues since 2010.The city's attorney argues this newly-illegal activity is still legal, because drunk driving.
“Our ordinance is a narrowly-tailored nuisance abatement law to protect the public from dangerous, repeat DWI offenders and the vehicles they use committing DWI offenses, placing innocent citizens’ lives and property at risk,” city attorney Jessica Hernandez said in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “The ordinance provides defenses to forfeiture to protect innocent owners and has been upheld by the courts.”Yes, all asset forfeiture statutes and ordinances theoretically provide "defenses to forfeiture" and have been "upheld by courts." That doesn't make them right, especially when a law directly governing the city's actions has been passed and forbids the very thing it continues to do.
And as for the DWI excuse, the city itself admits that half the vehicles it seizes do not belong to the person driving them. So, all it's really doing is taking cars because it can, not because it has any interest in preventing drunk drivers from driving. Then it lays the burden of proof -- along with the time and expense of fighting these seizures -- on the people whose vehicles have been taken (often for the actions of someone else) and calls it a reasonable avenue of "defense to forfeiture."
Once vehicles are seized, it generally takes $850 to liberate them. Most are auctioned. This money then becomes part of a cash-heavy feedback loop by going directly to the prosecutors and police departments who run the seizure program.
Stacking the deck further is the fact that the city counts its seizures before they're seized as part of its budgetary plans.
According to Wednesday’s lawsuit, Albuquerque forecasts how many vehicles it will not only seize but sell at auction. The city’s 2016 budget estimates it will have 1,200 vehicle seizure hearings, release 350 vehicles under agreements with the property owners, immobilize 600 vehicles, and to sell 625 vehicles at auction.When government agencies have predetermined the amount of vehicles they will need to seize to hit budget projections, they will do everything in their power -- including, apparently, ignoring new laws forbidding this sort of thing -- to ensure the number of vehicles they seize is the number of vehicles they planned to seize. The incentives could not be more perverted and yet, government officials claim the system will somehow result in only the vehicles of the truly guilty being taken and sold to pay for more vehicles being taken and sold.
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Filed Under: albuquerque, asset forfeiture, daniel ivey-soto, lawsuit, lisa toracco, new mexico, police
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Now you're all looking it up on IMDB.
Now you're all looking at Youtube.
Now you're all cursing me out for making you see that mess of a film (some of you it's remembering it).
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Simple test...
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Re: Simple test...
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Complications
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Re: Complications
It will all come out on your side after a multi-year prolonged court battle, costing you hundreds of thousands of dollars. The officer will get a reprimand for felonious activity, or might even have to move to another police force.
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The cop commits a felony on camera, you arrest him on camera, he draws his gun to shoot you on camera and drops sans head courtesy of Mr Scoped Rifle, also on camera.
Completely legal, and with evidence to prove it.
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Re: Re: Re: Complications
Are you aware of any cases in which someone knowingly killed a police officer in the performance of his duty, survived, and successfully argued self defense?
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Share the proceeds
Okay, it's still wrong and illegal for the cities to do this, but how else are they going to enforce the new law?
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There's a simple resolution available to the state.
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Re: There's a simple resolution available to the state.
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Grand theft
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Assuming I'm remembering correctly, I could see some Joe Schmoe having his car - uh - seized by some cop and he goes into court and sues for the loss of the car, the money spent getting it back, the time/wages/financial benefits lost owing to not having the car, and courts costs, and the harm to his reputation, all at triple the going rate. Tack on fees, fines and interest, and our putative Mr. Schmoe could be coming into a pretty fair chunk of change courtesy of the taxpayers of Albuquerque.
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If the police arrest someone for drunk driving, should you allow the drunk to continue on their way in the car? The answer of course is no. Operating a motor vehicle while drunk is against the public interest. At that point, the vehicle is impounded. It's entirely normal. It doesn't matter who owns the car, it matters that it was being used illegal to do something that clearly endangers the public.
The fee to recover the car are not unreasonable. They are high, but they represent the costs related to operating the tow truck, of securing the vehicle for the period of time, and the process of returning it in a legal manner. I do also believe that there is a deterrent factor for owners to not lend their cars to drunks.
As for the "forecasting", it's a pretty normal part of any city budget exercise. Based on their past experience, this is what they expect and what they put in their budget. It isn't setting a goal or setting some soft of "you must get these many cars", rather it's a reflection of their past experience and their projections for the year. Otherwise, their budget would be flawed. Taking it as a mandate or an order is to pretty much take it out of context and entirely miss the point of a budget exercise. Should they also remove income from traffic tickets in their budget or expected losses to bad debt because that would be creating a mandate for those things?
If the state really wanted to make a difference, they would pass a law that said any monies from vehicle seizures had to be given to charity or forwarded to the state for use in charitable work - or perhaps rehab facilities. My guess is that the same number of cars would be seized, because people don't stop driving drunk just because the fines and fees go somewhere else.
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The city cannot continue to enforce a law that has been preempted by the state, no matter how reasonable it was before.
On a secondary note, it's not just a matter of "fees to return the car". The car is not just in the temporary care of the city waiting for the owner to take it back. The city considers it to be seized. The owner has to make a "settlement" with the city to get it back, which the city is under no obligation to offer.
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Asset Seizure != Impounding.
Therefore you are justifying asset seizure by claiming impoundment is reasonable, and therefore justifying authoritarian action by claiming it is something else.
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A guy I used to know got his car impounded once. He was pulled over for speeding and the officer discovered that he had a perfectly valid driver's license... from out of state. (Apparently that's enough to impound your car in some states.)
Due to obnoxious circumstances beyond his control, it was a week before he was able to get it out of the impound. It cost about $500, and the bulk of that was the cost of holding it there for a week. So $850 seems completely unreasonable and out of line. (And that's if this were actually an impound; as others have pointed out, there's a big difference between that and asset seizure.)
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The state is a gang
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Spineless
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Heaven:
The police are British
The cooks are French
The engineers are German
The administrators are Swiss
The lovers are Italian
Hell:
The police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are Italian
The administrators are French
The lovers are Swiss
British police are on the whole a reasonable lot. They don't routinely tote guns like the US police, are well trained, and have to put up with endlessly poor management and government directives. That said, there are plenty of scandals to choose from. My personal favourite is 'Plebgate'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebgate
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Particularly in the police department, that's quite more accurate.
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Heaven:
The police are British
The cooks are French
The engineers are German
Hell:
The police are German
The cooks are British
The engineers are French
The other two were added later to pad out the joke and make fun of a couple more countries.
And German police are much more harsh than either of the other two countries. It makes perfect sense, even ignoring that Nazis no longer (supposedly) exist in Germany. Remember that the war crimes trials only put the leaders away. All the remaining infrastructure (like police) remained the same.
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Crime Wave
That's a lot of car jackin's!
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impoundment fees, another cash cow
Private car storage lots around here charge $50 per month to store a car in a secure fenced area (or $100/month for a locked private garage) but city impoundment lots can charge that much or more per day.
So by the time you prove your innocence and finally get your car back, you might owe the city far more in storage costs than your car is even worth.
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Par for the coarse. . .
Your have,
Wiretaps without a warrant using stingrays and parallel construction when they find something they want to pursue.
Entrapment, where the entire crime was imagined, funded, and pushed forward by law enforcement just to arrest some easily coerced idiot.
President's single handedly creating secret laws, when most of us believed their authority didn't include the power to create laws, let alone secret laws, and that the constitution specifically tasked congress with making laws.
They really seem to have lost sight of both the spirit and the letter of the law, in there self-righteous zeal for protecting the homeland!!
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5th Admendment
"No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
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That's right! Your taxes at work!
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