Michigan County Sued For Stealing Cars From Innocent Car Owners Via Civil Forfeiture

from the someone-did-some-crime-somewhere-maybe-so-we're-taking-your-stuff dept

A 1996 decision by the Michigan Supreme Court set the precedent for the widespread abuse of civil asset forfeiture in the state. The ruling said being an innocent owner of property seized is no defense and any forfeiture predicated on the illegal acts of others could result in the actual owner being deprived of property without violating their Constitutional rights.

The state's law enforcement agencies took this ruling and ran with it. To ensure minimum legal hassle, cops are "fighting" crime by taking small amounts of cash and 20-year-old vehicles from people they imagine might have committed a crime, were thinking about committing a crime, or happened to wander into an area where crime exists.

The city of Detroit and Wayne County prosecutors are the busiest of the state's busy kleptomaniacs.

In an ongoing crackdown, Wayne County has seized more than 2,600 vehicles and collected more than $1.2 million in revenue from civil asset forfeiture over the past two years.

A proposed class action has been filed challenging the city's forfeiture program which deprives the owners of their property due to other people's actions. The lawsuit [PDF], filed with the assistance of the Institute for Justice, tells just two of these 2,600 stories. Both involve vehicle owners losing their cars because of someone else's alleged criminal acts -- even when no criminal charges were ever filed.

The first involves a woman who had to file for bankruptcy and now takes the bus because the city decided to take her car from her.

Melisa Ingram, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, knows the many abuses of Detroit’s system firsthand. Last summer her car was seized by Wayne County sheriff’s deputies after she lent it to her then-boyfriend so he could drive to a friend’s barbeque. Later that day, police pulled him over for slowing down in an area known for prostitution. Although he was never charged with a crime, police nevertheless seized Melisa’s 2017 Ford Fusion.

Ingram paid $1,355 to get her car back. Six months later, she again loaned the vehicle to her boyfriend while she attended a barbecue. As he was pulling away from the house, the same Wayne County deputies pulled him over and seized the car again, claiming the house he was leaving was supposedly connected to drugs or prostitution. Just like the previous incident, the car was seized immediately and no criminal charges were filed. Ingram could not afford the $1,800 the police said she had to pay to release her car.

A similar thing happened to another plaintiff -- only this time cops yanked the car out right from underneath him. His story is even stranger, but it had the same end result: law enforcement had one more car in its possession than it did prior to the stop.

In July 2019, a man with whom Robert [Reeves] sometimes works asked him to visit a job site where he was clearing rubbish. The man had a skid-steer loader at the site and wanted to know if Robert knew how to operate it. Robert demonstrated how to use the equipment and the two men planned to meet the next day to begin their work.

Robert then drove to a nearby gas station and went inside to purchase a bottle of water. As he was leaving, officers surrounded him and demanded to know what he knew about a skid steer that was allegedly stolen from Home Depot. Robert knew nothing other than that the other man had rental paperwork from Home Depot, which was consistent with Robert’s understanding that the equipment had been rented. After several hours of detention in the back of a police car, Robert was let go without being arrested. He has not been charged with anything.

Police seized Robert’s Camaro on the spot, along with two cell phones and $2,280 that he had in his pocket.

More than six months have passed since this seizure and Wayne County prosecutors have yet to move forward with forfeiture proceedings. With no proceedings, there's no way to challenge the seizure. Meanwhile, his car sits in an impound lot racking up fees. Reeves was told by the Vehicle Seizure Unit that he would need to hire a lawyer if he wanted to get any answers at all about his car and how to get it back. But all this did was force Reeves to spend more money getting nowhere.

Robert then hired an attorney, but employees of the Vehicle Seizure Unit and Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office refused to speak with his attorney, too. No one will take their calls, despite dozens and dozens of attempts to learn more.

Since the agencies involved in the seizure can keep up to 100% of proceeds from forfeited property, there's zero incentive for them to work with the victims of these programs, much less move forward quickly with forfeiture proceedings. And agencies appear to make it more difficult than the process already is by serving notification -- seemingly deliberately -- to parties other than the owners of the property. In Ingram's case, the first notice went to her boyfriend who was driving the seized car. In Reeve's case, he was never served at all.

These experiences aren't unique. They can't be. A single county doesn't seize more than 3 cars a day if it's not profitable. But unless the law is changed -- or state precedent overturned -- police will continue to take property from innocent owners because being innocent isn't enough to prevent a forfeiture. That's what the plaintiffs are hoping to change. The lawsuit seeks a ruling declaring the state's forfeiture policies unconstitutional -- a violation of the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. It's an uphill fight, given state court precedent, but a federal challenge may finally upend the terrible laws that ruin state residents' lives and deprive them of their property without any finding of criminal wrongdoing.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, legalized theft, melisa ingram, michigan, robert reeves, wayne county

Prosecutor On Forfeiture Reforms: Making Us Prosecute Drugs Cases Will Make It Harder To Prosecute Drug Cases

from the catch-22-is-non-fiction dept

I thought I had read the worst defense of civil asset forfeiture when I read a former Michigan police chief's argument against a conviction requirement being instituted in his state. Former Police Chief Robert Stevenson's argument was basically this: a conviction requirement makes it too hard for cops to take property from people without proof.

Law enforcement will be severely handicapped if state lawmakers succumb to the misconception that no forfeiture should take place without a conviction on proceeds under $50,000.

[...]

Drugs may not be present, but everything else confirms and indicates drug trafficking, i.e., ledger books, scales, pre-recorded narcotics buy funds and packaging materials. In this particular scenario, as well as a multitude of others, the police and prosecutors could not establish a case to seize anything if Michigan adopts the $50,000 threshold.

All this evidence and nothing to do with it, I guess. Like many in the law enforcement field, Stevenson clings to the myth that robbing random people at gunpoint somehow cripples drug cartels. This belief is backed by far less evidence than the long list of stuff Stevenson claims can't be cobbled into a successful prosecution. We're more than 40 years deep into a War on Drugs and the only thing that's changed for the positive is the public's attitude towards civil asset forfeiture.

Michigan's legislature is considering adding a conviction requirement for forfeitures under $50,000. Opponents of property rights and due process keep crawling out of the woodwork, offering up increasingly nonsensical defenses of forfeiture. But nothing is stupider than this prosecutor's objection:

”Since a conviction is now required, it will make it extremely difficult to prosecute high level drug dealers,” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said via email.

REQUIRING PROSECUTORS TO PROSECUTE DRUG DEALERS WILL MAKE IT HARDER TO PROSECUTE DRUG DEALERS.

This kind of reasoning suggests the real problem with closing the deal, prosecution-wise, might be the prosecutor's arguments.

It doesn't get worse from there. But it certainly doesn't get any better. Allowing Worthy to expand on this theory does not bring enlightenment or clarification. It just makes the theory bigger and dumber.

“Often in these cases, witnesses are intimidated to the point that they do not show up for trial, sometimes losing their lives because of the retaliation,” Worthy said. “It is our fear that this will get worse now that drug dealers know that if there are no witnesses, there will be no conviction and they can get their property back.”

How in fuck do you draw the line from "taking cash from some dude cops pulled over" to "witness intimidation?" This is the brilliant legal mind handling prosecutions for Michigan's largest city. All this says is that forfeiture was never about keeping drugs and drug dealers off the street. It was always about the cash. We know this, but cops and prosecutors will never say it out loud. Worthy's attempt to portray almost-suspicionless cash seizures as leverage in prosecutions the government NEVER PLANS TO PURSUE is inadvertently transparent.

The only argument that could be worse than Worthy's defense is the truth: cops and prosecutors prefer taking property because it's easier and it enriches them personally. But we should expect nothing less (nothing more?) from a prosecutor who once asserted there's a link between real-life and video game violence, stating "no one" could "convince" her otherwise, no matter what evidence they presented. Seems like evidence and assertions are never in the same place when Worthy's in charge. I can see why she's so opposed to doing a job she's clearly not qualified to perform.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, drugs, kym worthy, legalized theft, michigan, prosecution, wayne county