4closure Fraud Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?
On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, towalk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with BIG Potential!”
They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.
He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.
No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.
Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.
The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)
The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not beturned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.
“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.
Later, she learned that cash-for-freedom deals had become a point of pride for Tenaha, and that versions of the tactic were used across the country. “Be safe and keep up the good work,” the city marshal wrote toWashington, following a raft of complaints from out-of-town drivers who claimed that they had been stopped in Tenaha and stripped of cash, valuables, and, in at least one case, an infant child, without clear evidence of contraband.
Outraged by their experience in Tenaha, Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson helped to launch a class-action lawsuit challenging the abuse of a legal doctrine known as civil-asset forfeiture. “Have you looked it up?” Boatright asked me when I met her this spring at Houston’s H&H Saloon, where she runs Steak Night every Monday. She was standing at a mattress-size grill outside. “It’ll blow your mind.”
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Thieves, hiding behind a uniform and badge, carrying a gun with a license to kill you and get away with murder.
Wow, interesting coincidence. In the late 1990’s I was working in the Tenaha and surrounding areas running a crew planting pine trees with foreign H1-H2B workers. Everywhere we went around the surrounding towns we were harassed by locals and local law enforcement. That part of Texas bordering Louisiana and that northwestern part of Louisiana has some inbreeding problems and no doubt corrupt law enforcement legal systems. I was stopped with our van full of foreign H1-H2B workers checked for all department of labor requirements, etc.
Ha … I have no money, no house, and they can have my 20-year-old car. Can’t take my 1st born – she grew up and moved away.
. . .
The police find money it is there’s. Has to be drug money any time they find it. It will go into evidence and be lost by them. Happens all the time.
“In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops drive a Cadillac Escalade stencilled with the words “This Used To Be a Drug Dealer’s Car, Now It’s Ours!”
It was never actually the drug dealer’s car to begin with. It was only on loan to him as long as he paid the rental fee (registration).
Regardless, this is a despicable practice.
You ain’t taking nothing from me.
Civil Forfeiture
The Civil Forfeiture law, with the latest amendment, Public law 90-351 is a Washington D.C. municipal law, it has no application in the several states .Furthermore, the Supreme Court ruled it un-Constitutional. The whores in the various state legislation write conforming legislation, with no regard as to its limitation.
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=28644
575 – Statement by the President Upon Signing the District of Columbia Crime Bill.
December 27, 1967
LAST YEAR I withheld my approval from a D.C. crime bill. In my judgment, that bill would not have served the people of Washington as an effective crime-fighting weapon. Moreover, it would have seriously invaded individual rights.
I have given the most careful consideration to the bill before me now. I find it in many respects a substantial improvement.
It contains provisions which will clearly help the fight against crime. –The District policeman will now be able to issue a simple citation to a person he arrests on a misdemeanor charge, instead of wasting time taking the offender to the station house
Note: As enacted, the bill (H.R. 10783) is Public Law 90-226 (81 Stat. 734). The statement was released at San Antonio, Texas.
The Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 was approved by the President on June 19, 1968 (Public Law 90-351, 82 Stat. 197).
Public Law 90-226, “An Act Relating to Crime and Criminal Procedure in the District of Columbia,” was the final bill signed by the President during 1967.