On Monday I received a letter in the mail from a gang that calls themselves the IRS claiming I owe them money from a contract in 2008 I signed under duress.
Now I am under no obligation to pay this money because this contract was not signed voluntarily like most contractual obligations. But that doesn’t matter to this criminal gang whose supposed colors are red, white and blue.
One problem with this contract is that without going through the courts the police can come and steal my stuff to take care of this debt disregarding a little something the constitution calls due process.
22 year old college student Anthony Smelley found this out in Putnam County, Indiana last year. Reason Magazine has the story.
Around 3 in the morning on January 7, 2009, a 22-year-old college student named Anthony Smelley was pulled over on Interstate 70 in Putnam County, Indiana. He and two friends were en route from Detroit to visit Smelley’s aunt in St. Louis. Smelley, who had recently received a $50,000 settlement from a car accident, was carrying around $17,500 in cash, according to later court documents. He claims he was bringing the money to buy a new car for his aunt.
The officer who pulled him over, Lt. Dwight Simmons of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department, said that Smelley had made an unsafe lane change and was driving with an obscured license plate. When Simmons asked for a driver’s license, Smelley told him he had lost it after the accident. Simmons called in Smelley’s name and discovered that his license had actually expired. The policeman asked Smelley to come out of the car, patted him down, and discovered a large roll of cash in his front pocket, in direct contradiction to Smelley’s alleged statement in initial questioning that he wasn’t, in fact, carrying much money.
A record check indicated that Smelley had previously been arrested (though not charged) for drug possession as a teenager, so the officer called in a K-9 unit to sniff the car for drugs. According to the police report, the dog gave two indications that narcotics might be present. So Smelley and his passengers were detained and the police seized Smelley’s $17,500 cash under Indiana’s asset forfeiture law.
But a subsequent hand search of the car turned up nothing except an empty glass pipe containing no drug residue in the purse of Smelley’s girlfriend. Lacking any other evidence, police never charged anybody in the car with a drug-related crime. Yet not only did Putnam County continue to hold onto Smelley’s money, but the authorities initiated legal proceedings to confiscate it permanently.
A couple years ago, probably in 2007 or 2008, I received a letter from a local gang called “Sheriffs Office,” whose members wear brown shirts and pants and drive cars with “Sheriff” written on the side. The letter said I owed some gang called “The State of Indiana” money and said that if I did not take care of this debt they would use asset forfeiture to take my stuff to satisfy this debt.
No court date, no due process, they would just straight up steal my stuff and I’d never see it again. This is usually used on suspected criminals but I have never been convicted of a crime, I just dare refuse to give these thugs money.
All this leads to corruption within government and police. It’s legalized theft and turns cops into robbers as they can come right into your house and take whatever they want without a court date and a conviction and even a warrant saying they can do it.
They will take your property for whatever reason they want, and guess what they do with it. A Downsize DC dispatch from Monday, the same day I received the bill has some stories.
In Texas, a district attorney has been indicted for using $200,000 of forfeiture funds to line his own pockets and pay for trips to casinos http://www.examiner.com/headlines-in-san-antonio/former-texas-county-district-attorney-indicted-for-misusing-200-000-for-extra-pay-and-casino-trips* In Indiana, where the law requires forfeiture loot to be spent on public education, only one county is complying with the law. In the other counties, law enforcement departments are keeping almost all the money, and the Attorney General doesn’t seem to care! http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/18/indianas-attorney-general-on-a
Are you surprised by this corruption? You shouldn’t be.
If confiscating property is an institutional mission, one must worry about the people such a group will employ to carry out that mission. If a government tells its employees that they must steal to meet their budgets – that is, engage in asset forfeiture – then some will rationalize that stealing is okay.
And they’ll steal from their employer, too.
The Institute for Justice has a tantalizing list of how some local posses have spent the loot. http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3117&Itemid=165
Here are some things the Institute for Justice article showed the forfeiture money being spent on.
- in Camden County, Ga., a $90,000 Dodge Viper for the county’s DARE program;
- in Colorado, bomber jackets for the Colorado State Patrol;
- in Austin, Texas, running gear for the police department;
- in Fulton County, Ga., football tickets for the district attorney’s office,
- in Webb County, Texas, $20,000 for TV commercials for the district attorney’s re-election campaign;
- in Kimble County, Texas, $14,000 for a “training seminar” in Hawaii for the staff of the district attorney’s office;
- in Albany, N.Y., over $16,000 for food, gifts and entertainment for the police department.
A sheriff in Georgia has even been the subject of a grand jury investigation for alleged misuse of forfeited assets (see also “Extravagance with Forfeiture Funds in Camden County, Ga.” on p. 19). In this particular county,
$3,000,000 was used to build a sheriff’s substation;
vehicles were purchased not only for the department but also for other county departments and neighboring law enforcement agencies;
$250,000 was donated to the sheriff’s alma mater for a scholarship.
Despite claims to the contrary, cops accuse people of crimes or that they “owe” tax money and come in and legally steal your property and use it on their own adventures and budget needs.
One study of 770 police managers found that 40% agree or strongly agree civil forfeiture is “necessary” for budget supplement.
You don’t own anything, the government owns all your possessions and civil forfeiture proves just that. They can steal your house any time they want, they can steal your car any time they want, they can steal your TV or expensive collections or even your children any time they want, for whatever reason they want, and they don’t even have to prove it. A little something they call “reasonable doubt.”
That’s all it takes, the police just simply have to accuse you of something, with no facts, steal your property and possessions and you never see them again and the police meet their budgets.
All they have to to is trump up the bogus charges and scare you into a plea deal, which you should never take, and your ass is in jail and you never see your property ever again. Good luck getting it back.
So why should I give this criminal gang my hard earned money? What obligation do I have to them? Who’s going to hold these legalized robbers accountable?
It’s time you stand up to this. Imagine if we had private protection agencies that we voluntarily agreed to fund and were held accountable. You think this would happen?
If they will not honor the 14th amendment then it is time we will.
http://forfeiturereform.com/
This is some work on the subject from Columbia’s own Eapen Thampy.
“All they have to to is trump up the bogus charges and scare you into a plea deal…”
Most of the times they don’t even have to get you to plead to something. In fact, in many cases, they don’t even have to charge you. Just the fact that they arrested you (or someone in possession of your property) is enough to seize it.
This is amazing. Nothing like a little due process (sarcasm).
Right on!
http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/sep/05/forfeiture-laws-ripe-for-reform/
Most, if not all of the non IRS forfeiture cases are based of the RICO law – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act
This was originally passed to prevent Organized crime from using illegal gains for its trial defense but like so many laws has since been expanded and abused by authorities. The abuse started in the 80′s, when the government decided to apply RICO as a tool in “the war on drugs”. Unfortunately the application was not just against large scale drug dealers, but users as well. So if cops found a joint in a car, they assumed the car was purchased with “drug profits” and the car got seized. As was pointed out in this article, without even finding any drugs cops started declaring cash money over a certain amount carried by people as “drug money” and seizing it. They even seized the Woods Hole research ship – http://articles.latimes.com/1989-03-22/local/me-81_1_fishing-vessel although public scorn caused the authorities to return the boat. The worst part of RICO asset seizure is the authorities aren’t required to prosecute you. Big time dealers have walked, by agreeing NOT to fight asset forfeiture, essentially legally bribing the authorities to let them go. With asset forfeiture the person who has his assets seized is in the weird position of having to take the government to court to try to get his stuff back. I think a simple reform would probably bring a lot of this shit to a halt. The law should be changed so that if the government seizes assets they HAVE to prosecute you within a reasonable time(2-3 months?) or return the property. Also, small personal use amounts of drugs would NOT be a justification for RICO application.
Personally I think it would be far better to get rid of most, if not all forfeiture laws, but it seems impossible to get even the reasonable reform I suggested above through congress.
@Eapen Thampy
Ohh, the Feds and the State are fighting over the loot, how cute…
Forfeiture is becoming more and more prevalent in this country. To see the hundreds of
pages of property our Government has seized and plans to keep go to “forfeiture.gov”. You need never be accused of a crime to permanently lose your property to the government, or your property may be tied up, literally for years, in someone else’s criminal case, while you wait for your day in court at the “ancillary hearing” to try and get it back. We call this “due process”
I don’t think you’re doing the American people any favors by telling them they have no rights–telling them the police can do anything they want–because it’s simply not true. Here in the “land of the free,” most people just don’t know their rights. Sadly, most people assume cops can do anything they want, which is the biggest reason why cops and the government often get away with victimizing them. Instead of telling people they just have to deal with being screwed over, maybe you should instruct them to read the United States Constitution so they’ll know their rights someday when they really need to know their rights.
Last year, as I walked across the United States of America, I was harassed by cops on nearly a daily basis for months. Knowing my rights, I almost always stopped cooperating with them as soon as they asked or demanded to see my identification. Usually they would continue harassing me for a while after my refusal to cooperate, in an attempt to sweet-talk or intimidate me into playing their game, but all of them eventually took ‘no’ for an answer. All except one, that is.
Near Putnamville, Indiana, I was harassed, beaten up, falsely imprisoned, charged with violating laws I literally could not possibly have broken, and kidnapped by Putnam County Sheriff Steve Fenwick and Corporal Jon Chadd. After all that, I had to spend three nights in jail, just for knowing my rights.
Three weeks ago I had my court date. The scumbag cops actually showed up to testify against me, but I was acquitted of the charges because the charges were baseless. Here’s my very detailed story about that incident and everything that happened after it: http://aimlessryan.blogspot.com/2011/02/land-of-free-part-i.html.
I’m not saying justice has been served just because I was ultimately acquitted. Not even close. No, I still got screwed in more ways than I care to mention here. But in the end, neither the Putnam County Sheriff nor the legal system got to fuck me over like they wanted to.
Instead of just bitching about being wronged, I now have a story to tell about how I stood up to “the man” and won (sorta). I have a story that other people can read and use to better understand their rights, precisely because I stood up and defeated the people you say can’t be beat. And if more people start knowing their rights, as well as the legal limitations of cops, someday dirty cops will think twice before victimizing people like they did with me and all the others you’ve alluded to in this story.
One good thing that came from this whole experience is that I now know my rights inside and out. As a result, whenever I get harassed by cops again, I will be armed with more than enough knowledge to make them leave me alone and disappear without much of a hassle.
Pardon me. I screwed up the URL in the last post. The URL is actually http://aimlessryan.blogspot.com/2011/01/land-of-free-part-i.html.