Four egregious examples of asset forfeiture abuse

By Jeremy Daw

Americans for Forfeiture Reform is at it again. This time, the nonpartisan advocacy group has targeted a federal case in the Southern District of California, US v. Moser, in which the trial court cut a victorious defense attorney's federally-authorized fee award almost in half. In an amicus curae brief filed at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, attorney Mahesha Subbaraman cites a litany of egregious abuses by greedy law enforcement to argue why lawyers who agree to take forfeiture cases, many times without any retainer, need to be well-compensated for their resource-intensive defenses. The alternative is a chilling effect, through which targeted property owners become even more powerless against the might of the federal government than they already are.

The following is a list of some of the worst abuses of civil asset forfeiture laws ever uncovered, as recounted by Subbaraman's brief:

• Realtor Deon Owens was on his way to California to purchase some real estate when he was pulled over by state troopers on a routine traffic stop. Officers never found any contraband but did discover about $20,000 in cash, which they attempted to seize. Unfortunately for the officers, one of them was recorded at the scene telling a colleague “I say we take his money and, um, count it as a drug seizure” so the officers could obtain “new laptops in their offices.” The trial judge ordered the money returned.
• A secretary for a Pentecostal church was pulled over on his way to buy land for his church, carrying $28,500 worth of parishioners' donations for the purchase. The Virginia state trooper who conducted the stop claimed he was speeding, yet never issued a traffic ticket. Instead, he seized the cash.
• Kyle and Berekti Jones, on their way to Ethiopia to visit relatives, watched federal airport authorities seize $35,131 of their cash at the customs desk because they inaccurately estimated its amount. The Joneses were never charged with any crime, but they had to go to federal court to get their money back. The federal judge who presided over their case ruled that government agents had “manipulated the Joneses' confusion into a deliberate failure to report” their cash because the agents “wanted a statistic for their supervisor and they cudgeled the Joneses to get one.”
• Russ and Pat Caswell built up their motel business over 30 years into a piece of commercial real estate worth $1.8 million, which they owned outright. The target proved too tempting for DEA agent Vincent Kelly, who later testified that his job “was to locate... lucrative forfeiture targets.” Kelly attempted to seize the valuable property under the claim that “frequent drug activity occurred there.” But a federal judge denied the forfeiture, noting that after 196,000 rooms rented over a seven-year period, only 15 minor drug offenses were ever reported – an incident rate of less than 0.001%.