Seems I have to periodically re-post this old comment because civil forfeiture is still a thing, and it still sucks. Re-reading it gets my blood boiling. My ex's brother was a good guy; his life was destroyed because the Modesto Police Department (and the sheriffs) were crooked AF.
I've spent hundreds of hours in civil forfeiture court watching cases. It can be a real shitshow. The first thing to remember is that a lot of civil forfeiture starts before a court case is even filed.
In Illinois the district attorney will send you a notice saying they have seized your property and you have 14 days to dispute it in writing by filing a specific (confusing) type of form (which they tell you they will neither provide to you or assist you in any way to complete it). If you fail to notice the form, or if you can't figure it out, or file it late, then your stuff is gone. Dead. The form just means they now have to file a suit and serve you, and now the process starts a second, more complicated road where you have to go to court, file an appearance, potentially pay a lawyer, file motions and maybe go to trial.
99% of time once it goes to court the gov will sit down and have an informal negotiation with you to pay you not to go to trial on the case. The gov attorneys I knew all had an 80% figure. They would always start by saying "Look, we'll give you half your money back right now. I'll write you a check, this matter is over, you never need to come to court again." I would tip off everyone I could that the gov would go to 80% without a fight.
I've seen some funny ones. A dope dealer. They'd taken $150K in dope money. It was definitely dope money. But here they are telling him "Look, we'll give you $90K of it back right now, straight into your bank if you drop this. We'll also try to get you a year off your sentence too."
My ex's brother's situation was in the early-90s, when civil forfeiture was - well, I don't think the legal concept was new, but the cops sure acted like it was. They kept telling his attorney that there was no process to challenge the forfeiture, and the attorney seemed to confirm that. He spent countless hours just trying to figure out how to proceed in court.
I think at one point his attorney got a court to basically order the cops to return his assets, but the cops flat-out refused. I think that's when the cops came with the offer of about 10% of the value of the seized assets (around $50K). His attorney, a close family friend, advised him to take it.
My ex's brother was absolutely innocent. And the whole process broke him. He had to move him and his family back into his parents' house while the situation unfolded. And that's why he took his family to live in Mexico. It's such a shame, too, because last I heard he was doing really well in Mexico; he opened a bunch of automated car washes. So, it sucks that a hard-working, entrepreneurial dude like him took his talents to another country because the corrupt-ass local cops wanted free shit.
That is wild - I'm not a 'defund the police' person, but at times like this, reading this story, that I fully understand the intent. It isn't about being unpoliced or lawless, it's about rejecting the system as it exists today and building something better and new.
If you have experience of behaviour like this, I understand that leaning.
Given that Modesto is a Democratic Party stronghold since the 1990s, wouldn't defunding the Democrats be less destructive? If the government and their police are corrupt, are they going to stop terrorizing the community if there are no police at all? That's an absurdly ignorant position. Has CHAZ and Mexico taught us nothing?
The original comment talks about replacing it with something else. Forfeiture is something across law enforcement bodies, not something that one party does. Plus, I’m not exactly seeing police departments get staffing turned over every time a political party changes. I don’t know where you’re making that connection.
But no matter what we do this is an unsolvable problem of policing/judicial system. There will always be people who are falsely accused/falsely convicted. Let's say less than 1%, as a hypothetical. Do we accept that due to that we might be reducing crime by a lot? That's a question society has to answer.
I think the best solution here is not focusing on policing/courts, but making sure that everyone in the society is content, so that they don't commit crimes. Happy people with resources a typical human wants probably don't commit many crimes.
Not to mention that a better paid public defender system (and courts) would help too. Cases are backlogged too much, and so on. Not to mention the abysmally low number of police per capita (compared to EU countries). Funding, funding, funding.
There are 3,144 counties in the US. Some of them in remote areas have a history of getting away with shakedowns. Places like Rawlins, Wyoming have probably had thousands of shakedowns since I-80 was built in 1956. Really a good idea to avoid those places at night.
ACAB, because non-bastard cops don't last long in the field. Cops that break the "thin blue line" and push back against this type of thing get ostracized.
Crazy story. I believe you, the judicial system can be extremely vile. I once had to deal with an unfounded accusation, and it took me a while to clear my name.
I can see how people with little or no money could get dragged into it, their lives likely destroyed. No one really cares, which makes it even worse.
The "lost her case" language is very much a public narrative around the court case, but from the legal perspective, her suit was dismissed for a lack of jurisdiction, which is pretty much the court refusing to consider the case.
> The FBI Seized Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost
I think it's decent, but still a bit ambiguous. Less ambiguous than if it just said "She Fought Back and Lost". My initial assumption formed by the title was still that she didn't get her money back.
Not really. Dismissed isn't the same thing as losing. The suit couldn't go forward because they returned the money, so she has no damages to sue over. I wonder if you can sue for lawyer fees...they took her money and made her hire a lawyer to get it back "willingly", something she wouldn't have had to do if they didn't take the money in the first place.
It depends what her suit asked for in "relief." Sometimes you can get punitive damages, even if the money was returned. Or I've sometimes got the money I wanted but continued the part of the suit for declaratory judgment (e.g. to force the government to declare they violated my rights).
We have been suffering from this problem for nearly 50 years now, due to ineffective supreme court checks and balances in the face of psychotically expansive executive interpretation of the law in the era of the war on drugs.
Americans will only do the right thing after they have exhausted all other options. Slavery, women's suffrage, jim crow laws, police brutality, civil forfeiture, reproductive rights, health care...we always seem to be among the last nations on the planet to figure out how to do things correctly. It's almost like our constitution is fatally flawed and designed for oppression rather than freedom.
What does that matter? The country still engaged in slavery for eight nine years, but had actually started in Colonial America in Virginia in 1619. So, in Virginia slavery was legal from 1619 to 1863. Yes, a petition was filed in Pennsylvania in 1688. How is this relevant?
> That died last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction.
If the issue is one of jurisdiction, did they file the case in the wrong court?
Following local news, I've seen the case where a case is closed because it was filed in the wrong court. A different court had jurisdiction in the matter. I wonder if that's what happened in this case.
If you read the judgement it basically says that because the FBI eventually returned the money, she no longer has a live interest as an individual.
They also denied that she’s part of some well defined class for a class action.
It’s not like they are saying there’s some other court she can go to.
US courts are generally infamous for denying justice whenever they see fit using technicalities like “standing” and other procedural grounds.
Environmental law violations, illegal surveillance programs, civil asset forfeiture like here, and constitutional violations are quite often practically impossible to get courts to address, especially if parts of the US government are the defendant.
There are different types of jurisdiction. Subject-matter, personal, venue, procedural, etc.
In this case, reading the opinion w/dismissal, there were two factors involved:
1) The court determined her individual claim was moot because the FBI had already discontinued the forfeiture proceedings & returned her seized property, with interest, before the appeal
2) Her class claim was also dismissed because no class had been certified before her individual claim became moot
Jurisdiction is a complicated word. What most people think of as jurisdiction is talking about law enforcement -- "you're out of your jurisdiction" -- to mean they are operating outside their geographical area.
That same term in law suits is called "venue", when you've filed in the wrong county, for instance.
This is just straight up theft. Obviously people are getting something for themselves out of it. It needs to be banned and investigated retroactively, with fines and jail times for all.
I know there is an anti-cryptocurrency sentiment on this site. But this is one of the many "political" problems, that is being transformed into a mere technical problem.
It gives the option of better self custody for that attack vector.
There are court filings where they included seized Monero wallets, and had no idea of the balance, no idea of the how to access the wallet due to lack of password, and most importantly, no proof that the balance they THINK they seized is still there
since you can retain access in multiple ways and can move funds from that wallet, that means the FBI seized a copy of a lock where funds were ostensibly behind. But no key, and not the only lock.
You can also use Monero as an intermediary mixer to fund anonymous wallets in other currencies. Since program and smart contract platforms have so many other assets to hold, like stablecoins. The governemnt won't seize those, while the government will seize your exchange accounts and the transparent wallets you transferred to from the exchange accounts. You want to unlink your assets.
This has worked for 10 years consecutively, and Monero has increased its security and continues to as computation performance improves.
It is likely that more blockchains go opaque with opt-in transparency, as computation continues to improve.
I mean in this specific case, just depositing it in a bank normally would have also prevented the problem. Storing $40k in cash anywhere is a bad idea.
It's not an illegal idea though, the government had no right to take it. But also what if the bank burns down, gets robbed, etc etc etc. Most security boxes aren't insured so you're screwed. And if you're paying to insure your cash, why not put it into a savings account and make the bank pay you for it.
Civil forfeiture is just one of those things that needs to die. Entire police department, prosecutors office, are exclusively funded by those funds. They have a gross incentive to violate peoples rights and take their money.
It's a nasty little tool that became huge during the 1980's cut-all-budgets-but-war-on-drugs era.
The public LOVED it because it was used to nail all those drug kingpins... (remember all the ferraris and speedboats the undercover cops had on Miami Vice. It wasn't fiction)
This is the problem with nodding yes to laws that will “only affect the bad people!”. If the law is ineffective, or if the law is effective and they run out of bad people to enforce it on - guess who they are coming after?!
The enablers either individually or demographically are low on the list. That's the problem, people feel justified being enablers because they rightly surmise the risk to them personally is low.
And qualified immunity. It's not an excuse for plebs to be ignorant of the law, but if it's not spelled out word for word to the police, they get to claim that obviously heinous violations of rights were not "clearly established boundaries" and get off completely scot-free. Rules for thee but not for me.
And it is a violation of the 4th Amendment for it to even exist in the first place.
The fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
They're being sneaky and skirting around it by charging objects with crimes, but everyone knows that is such bullshit that it's the kind of stupid fuckery that would have been pulled in the Spanish Inquisition.
Police in the states steal more than all thieves combined. (The only other category which also steals more than burglars are employers through wage theft.) And that is just based off very incomplete data as we lack transparency into most civil forfeiture at the local municipality level.
The money also does not go back into public service use. It's often funneled into items such as F-350 trucks for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual recent examples from Georgia).
There’s no proof against it because it’s factual. They just don’t like the narrative it forms by pointing it out, or they think it’s justified by the other value police/employers create, or they think the victims had it coming (by committing “time theft” or being criminals themselves even if I convicted because police only go after bad people / they are bad people because police went after them)
Well "wage theft" is also rhetorically abused to go beyond fraud, lack of payments or similiar actual misconduct and into bullshit Marx-tautology territory of "all profit is stolen from the worker". They think it helps spread their point but it really undermines it to anybody who catches on to their bullcrap.
Well the statistic I mentioned does not include your Marxist reference and doesn't need to include such a number to hold true. There’s nothing Marxist about it.
Not unexpected. The FBI has generally been a gang filled with thieves for at least 20 years. I'm not old enough to know if it was always like this.
It takes a lot of guts, and some real resources, to fight back when the FBI violates you like this. I never even considered it after some FBI stole all my computers(*1) and then, when 10 years later they gave them back, all my bitcoin was missing (the files and OS and everything there; the wallet was just wiped and replaced w/blank one with no transactions).
ref 1. My apartment was raided and burgled by the FBI as part of a 50+ person cross-country fishing expedition warrant looking for wikileaks members to squash political dissent in 2011. I was never charged with a crime or even indicted.
They replaced the entire wallet. The new wallet has no transactions at all while mine should've had many many dozens. So there were no addresses to check. I certainly didn't memorize them back then.
As for stirring trouble again with a lawsuit: I definitely don't want saurons eye back upon me. I just can't handle that kind of stress. Even if I'm in the right and it'd be a life changing amount of money. Even posting about it here on HN makes my anxiety spike and me start sweating. Just typing this kind of thing in public is risky.
It takes a strong person to stand up to the FBI. I wish Linda Martin all the luck and support. Hopefully they don't use her fighting back as a reason to target her for more harassment.
And that would also validate control of the same address at some point.
One thing to bear in mind is that it could have been a contractor who worked for the FBI. Someone at an external firm hired to do the job. Or just a tech at the FBI.
The FBI would still be liable, but would also potentially point their ire at the thief and criminal who did so, under contract.
A law firm might pro-bono the detective work, to see just who spent that coin, if anyone did.
"The process is the punishment" comes to mind. Not everyone is cut out to be a fighter and it's a shame that so many people end up needing to be one just to live their lives.
Yeah. In theory, the Constitution very clearly says that that kinda stuff is utterly verboten.
In practice, the Courts (supposedly sworn to uphold that Constitution) will happily accept 'most any hare-brained theory, so long is the bottom line is that the gov't and its chums are free to do as they wish unto the weak and expendable.
And this situation is nothing like unique to the past 2-3 decades. Nor to the Federal gov't. Nor to the US of A. I'd bet it was SOP in most places, back when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi was first being written down.
It's a holdover from Europe, which means most countries in the world have a form of it. Mexico, that socialist, gun-control utopia, is probably the best example. If another country besides the US ever gets something like PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) from the 1980s, they would have a clue.
Ignorance is bliss, but the US is probably still better.
Yes that's my claim, as defined in Mexican law since that's more like most countries' legal systems.
I don't know so my claim is weak, my Wikipedia articles on non-US legal systems is extremely slow going, and I have not written articles on this particular topic outside the US. :( The real basis of my claim is that most of the world would be expected to have judicial procedures for seizing assets more akin to our CAF. What the US considers reduced rights, like no jury trial, is just how things are elsewhere. (Ain't no one with a right to a jury trial anywhere in the world ever gonna choose a bench trial, it's that much of a difference.)
It is that the asset can be forfeit before a judicial decision. And as a second, that there is no requirement to involve the asset owner in a judicial proceeding.
Civil forfeiture is a hot topic all over the world. But the US has Executive forfeiture in practice.
One of the differences is that the US has PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), that in practice we have a clue. Since the 80s. It adds up.
As bad as CAF is I wouldn’t say it’s directly impinging on “freedom”. In fact it may be preferable to arresting a person in some cases so that could be said to be an argument in favor.
It may be preferable to lose your property in exchange for not getting arrested, but that's like saying I'd rather get pickpocketed than beaten and robbed. Most people would rather their legal property remain their legal property.
Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
> Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
Are you ignorant or a troll? This isn't an either/or situation of course. You could also be an ignorant troll.
> Are you ignorant or a troll? … You could also be an ignorant troll.
I'm a significant Wikipedian, so maybe.
> Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
No. They are independent and serve different purposes. Criminal fines are meant to be taken against legally possessed assets. When someone steals $10 million dollars, the $10 million dollars is seized via civil asset forfeiture. Hence when National Propaganda Radio reports some white collar criminal was fined $10,000 dollars for stealing $10 million dollars, what they're not telling you is that the $10 million dollars is going to be seized via a civil judicial process, regardless of any criminal judicial process. Otherwise it's easy to be confused when white collar criminals almost always get fines less than they stole. All criminals would have to do is steal more than the maximum fine, and NPR happily lets massive amounts of leftists think so.
Okay, and what if I pull out $10,000 cash from my bank, hop on a flight somewhere to buy a car from someone a few states over with the plan of driving my newly-purchased car home, but the TSA accuses the cash of being drug money and turns it over to the police?
If they give you a notice of seizure, then you must file an administrative claim for the assets, and if need be join the subsequent court case as a claimant. (You will be using what Americans would consider reduced rights compared to a criminal trial, but what the rest of the world considers normal rights.) If they don't give notice, file a civil action and Rule 41(g) motion, and probably make a pretty penny from quite a few people. This is not rocket science, it's well worn and has been developed over hundreds of years. ChatGPT can provide all the paperwork for the entire case in a few minutes. If you don't have any money, the judge will assign a lawyer not because you will have a right to it but because they really, really don't want to talk to plebs.
Anyone who writes things like that reveals that they are, in fact, just an ignorant troll. Thanks for confirming, I'll try to remember to ignore your comments in the future.
Well I guess that means you're not a Hoax News habitue. But you might as well add Wikipedia government and law articles to your ignore list. (In my defense, I wrote a lot of them a long time ago.)
Taking your stuff is indeed infringing upon freedom, and money is indeed "stuff". And money is how you pay for food, and housing, so doubly infringing.
The real lesson here is you can use mental gymnastics to interpret the constitution any way you want. As such, judges are inherently political actors.
Civil asset forfeiture should be a direct and obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, specificially "unreasonable search and seizure" but no, the law has contorted civil asset forfeiture to be OK because money is property and property has no constitutional rights.
The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property. The police as an institution began as slave catchers (ie returning slaves, being "property", to their owners). Even the FBI has its origin in the Mann Act [1], also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Basically, it was anti-misagenation.
More generally, if you look at any important course case, mainly Supreme Court precedents, just look at a decision with the lens of how the wealthy will benefit and you'll be able to prodict the outcome with at least a 90% accuracy.
The police are muscle that applies violence to advance the interests of the state. They only protect the wealthy insofar as that serves the interest of the state. The interests of the wealthy are generally fairly aligned with the state for various reasons. There is a subtle but important distinction between that and "serving the rich".
The inverse would be to use the monopoly on violence to punish those who wish to use property for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
Basically imagine police throwing in jail people who declare a plot of land as belonging to them, or someone who has seized the means of production and is now pocketing all the profits.
Civil forfeiture is one of those things that makes my blood boil every time I read about it. It is so unconstitutional, if not literally then in spirit, that I simply cannot understand how we as a society have continued to put up with it.
People have been crying foul about civil asset forfeiture for decades.
However nothing has been done yet because it’s yet another tool used to control the population. The current powers in government and their billionaire owners do not want civil asset forfeiture to disappear.
Thus part of the reason we are stuck in this endless "culture war" when we should be aiming our frustration at the billionaire class.
Seems I have to periodically re-post this old comment because civil forfeiture is still a thing, and it still sucks. Re-reading it gets my blood boiling. My ex's brother was a good guy; his life was destroyed because the Modesto Police Department (and the sheriffs) were crooked AF.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17395675#17398314
I've spent hundreds of hours in civil forfeiture court watching cases. It can be a real shitshow. The first thing to remember is that a lot of civil forfeiture starts before a court case is even filed.
In Illinois the district attorney will send you a notice saying they have seized your property and you have 14 days to dispute it in writing by filing a specific (confusing) type of form (which they tell you they will neither provide to you or assist you in any way to complete it). If you fail to notice the form, or if you can't figure it out, or file it late, then your stuff is gone. Dead. The form just means they now have to file a suit and serve you, and now the process starts a second, more complicated road where you have to go to court, file an appearance, potentially pay a lawyer, file motions and maybe go to trial.
99% of time once it goes to court the gov will sit down and have an informal negotiation with you to pay you not to go to trial on the case. The gov attorneys I knew all had an 80% figure. They would always start by saying "Look, we'll give you half your money back right now. I'll write you a check, this matter is over, you never need to come to court again." I would tip off everyone I could that the gov would go to 80% without a fight.
I've seen some funny ones. A dope dealer. They'd taken $150K in dope money. It was definitely dope money. But here they are telling him "Look, we'll give you $90K of it back right now, straight into your bank if you drop this. We'll also try to get you a year off your sentence too."
My ex's brother's situation was in the early-90s, when civil forfeiture was - well, I don't think the legal concept was new, but the cops sure acted like it was. They kept telling his attorney that there was no process to challenge the forfeiture, and the attorney seemed to confirm that. He spent countless hours just trying to figure out how to proceed in court.
I think at one point his attorney got a court to basically order the cops to return his assets, but the cops flat-out refused. I think that's when the cops came with the offer of about 10% of the value of the seized assets (around $50K). His attorney, a close family friend, advised him to take it.
My ex's brother was absolutely innocent. And the whole process broke him. He had to move him and his family back into his parents' house while the situation unfolded. And that's why he took his family to live in Mexico. It's such a shame, too, because last I heard he was doing really well in Mexico; he opened a bunch of automated car washes. So, it sucks that a hard-working, entrepreneurial dude like him took his talents to another country because the corrupt-ass local cops wanted free shit.
That is wild - I'm not a 'defund the police' person, but at times like this, reading this story, that I fully understand the intent. It isn't about being unpoliced or lawless, it's about rejecting the system as it exists today and building something better and new.
If you have experience of behaviour like this, I understand that leaning.
Given that Modesto is a Democratic Party stronghold since the 1990s, wouldn't defunding the Democrats be less destructive? If the government and their police are corrupt, are they going to stop terrorizing the community if there are no police at all? That's an absurdly ignorant position. Has CHAZ and Mexico taught us nothing?
The original comment talks about replacing it with something else. Forfeiture is something across law enforcement bodies, not something that one party does. Plus, I’m not exactly seeing police departments get staffing turned over every time a political party changes. I don’t know where you’re making that connection.
[flagged]
I understand that too.
But no matter what we do this is an unsolvable problem of policing/judicial system. There will always be people who are falsely accused/falsely convicted. Let's say less than 1%, as a hypothetical. Do we accept that due to that we might be reducing crime by a lot? That's a question society has to answer.
I think the best solution here is not focusing on policing/courts, but making sure that everyone in the society is content, so that they don't commit crimes. Happy people with resources a typical human wants probably don't commit many crimes.
Not to mention that a better paid public defender system (and courts) would help too. Cases are backlogged too much, and so on. Not to mention the abysmally low number of police per capita (compared to EU countries). Funding, funding, funding.
I'd be very happy with a happy/content society.
There are 3,144 counties in the US. Some of them in remote areas have a history of getting away with shakedowns. Places like Rawlins, Wyoming have probably had thousands of shakedowns since I-80 was built in 1956. Really a good idea to avoid those places at night.
It really is wild for me to think that I'd be at risk from the police like this, in any of the UK - but then again I'm a dull white guy.
I don't think the police have powers here to shake down anyone in this way (imprison maybe, but not shakedown like this).
Land of the free?
Let’s wait and see eh ? I don’t rule out anything in this country right now in the foreseeable future..
what on earth did you have in mind to pick rawlins? cheyenne, evanston, etc have made industry out of plucking out of state plates probably
Nothing but legalized thuggery.
ACAB, because non-bastard cops don't last long in the field. Cops that break the "thin blue line" and push back against this type of thing get ostracized.
That one bad apple done spoiled the barrel.
Crazy story. I believe you, the judicial system can be extremely vile. I once had to deal with an unfounded accusation, and it took me a while to clear my name.
I can see how people with little or no money could get dragged into it, their lives likely destroyed. No one really cares, which makes it even worse.
The title is a bit misleading and seems to imply she didn't get her savings back - she did, but the suit she filed saying it violated her rights lost.
Edit: title seems to have been edited since.
She was very lucky to get it back. Probably the only reason was they hoped she would drop the suit.
And to add, the lawsuit didn’t lose on its merits, but on lack of jurisdiction.
I feel like for lack of jurisdiction, the courts should refuse to hear the case, rather than have it count as a "lost" case?
I mean, that's basically what happens.
The "lost her case" language is very much a public narrative around the court case, but from the legal perspective, her suit was dismissed for a lack of jurisdiction, which is pretty much the court refusing to consider the case.
The title doesn't say nor imply anything about her getting it back though? It says her assets were seized which is correct.
The article itself has the title:
> The FBI Seized Her $40,000 Without Explaining Why. She Fought Back Against That Practice—and Lost
I think it's decent, but still a bit ambiguous. Less ambiguous than if it just said "She Fought Back and Lost". My initial assumption formed by the title was still that she didn't get her money back.
The submission title is "FBI seized $40k from Linda Martin without charging her with a crime" which doesn't have that issue.
It was not that originally.
Not really. Dismissed isn't the same thing as losing. The suit couldn't go forward because they returned the money, so she has no damages to sue over. I wonder if you can sue for lawyer fees...they took her money and made her hire a lawyer to get it back "willingly", something she wouldn't have had to do if they didn't take the money in the first place.
It depends what her suit asked for in "relief." Sometimes you can get punitive damages, even if the money was returned. Or I've sometimes got the money I wanted but continued the part of the suit for declaratory judgment (e.g. to force the government to declare they violated my rights).
The next person to try might try to get standing by claiming the loss of $40k lost the opportunity to gain interest or something along those lines.
They paid her back with interest, exactly as they are required to do.
We have been suffering from this problem for nearly 50 years now, due to ineffective supreme court checks and balances in the face of psychotically expansive executive interpretation of the law in the era of the war on drugs.
Americans will only do the right thing after they have exhausted all other options. Slavery, women's suffrage, jim crow laws, police brutality, civil forfeiture, reproductive rights, health care...we always seem to be among the last nations on the planet to figure out how to do things correctly. It's almost like our constitution is fatally flawed and designed for oppression rather than freedom.
Just browsing through [0] it seems the US began abolishing slavery before it was even a country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...
What does that matter? The country still engaged in slavery for eight nine years, but had actually started in Colonial America in Virginia in 1619. So, in Virginia slavery was legal from 1619 to 1863. Yes, a petition was filed in Pennsylvania in 1688. How is this relevant?
and there are too many individualists. Its great for settling a new land, but once established they refuse too look around and see community.
> That died last week, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed the suit for lack of jurisdiction.
If the issue is one of jurisdiction, did they file the case in the wrong court?
Following local news, I've seen the case where a case is closed because it was filed in the wrong court. A different court had jurisdiction in the matter. I wonder if that's what happened in this case.
If you read the judgement it basically says that because the FBI eventually returned the money, she no longer has a live interest as an individual.
They also denied that she’s part of some well defined class for a class action. It’s not like they are saying there’s some other court she can go to.
US courts are generally infamous for denying justice whenever they see fit using technicalities like “standing” and other procedural grounds.
Environmental law violations, illegal surveillance programs, civil asset forfeiture like here, and constitutional violations are quite often practically impossible to get courts to address, especially if parts of the US government are the defendant.
>If you read the judgement it basically says that because the FBI eventually returned the money, she no longer has a live interest as an individual.
This is how NYC dodged a Bruen type ruling for so long.
There are different types of jurisdiction. Subject-matter, personal, venue, procedural, etc.
In this case, reading the opinion w/dismissal, there were two factors involved:
1) The court determined her individual claim was moot because the FBI had already discontinued the forfeiture proceedings & returned her seized property, with interest, before the appeal
2) Her class claim was also dismissed because no class had been certified before her individual claim became moot
Jurisdiction is a complicated word. What most people think of as jurisdiction is talking about law enforcement -- "you're out of your jurisdiction" -- to mean they are operating outside their geographical area.
That same term in law suits is called "venue", when you've filed in the wrong county, for instance.
This is just straight up theft. Obviously people are getting something for themselves out of it. It needs to be banned and investigated retroactively, with fines and jail times for all.
I know there is an anti-cryptocurrency sentiment on this site. But this is one of the many "political" problems, that is being transformed into a mere technical problem.
How is that true? The FBI can, has, and does seize crypto assets with no more or less proof than in this case.
It can be easier to hide or obfuscate your crypto assets if you do it correctly, than physical cash. Key word being correctly.
It gives the option of better self custody for that attack vector.
There are court filings where they included seized Monero wallets, and had no idea of the balance, no idea of the how to access the wallet due to lack of password, and most importantly, no proof that the balance they THINK they seized is still there
since you can retain access in multiple ways and can move funds from that wallet, that means the FBI seized a copy of a lock where funds were ostensibly behind. But no key, and not the only lock.
You can also use Monero as an intermediary mixer to fund anonymous wallets in other currencies. Since program and smart contract platforms have so many other assets to hold, like stablecoins. The governemnt won't seize those, while the government will seize your exchange accounts and the transparent wallets you transferred to from the exchange accounts. You want to unlink your assets.
This has worked for 10 years consecutively, and Monero has increased its security and continues to as computation performance improves.
It is likely that more blockchains go opaque with opt-in transparency, as computation continues to improve.
Government agencies can - and frequently do - seize crypto. The US government now holds around 1% of all BTC, solely as a result of asset seizures.
I mean in this specific case, just depositing it in a bank normally would have also prevented the problem. Storing $40k in cash anywhere is a bad idea.
It's not an illegal idea though, the government had no right to take it. But also what if the bank burns down, gets robbed, etc etc etc. Most security boxes aren't insured so you're screwed. And if you're paying to insure your cash, why not put it into a savings account and make the bank pay you for it.
Civil forfeiture is just one of those things that needs to die. Entire police department, prosecutors office, are exclusively funded by those funds. They have a gross incentive to violate peoples rights and take their money.
They can also destroy your home in pursuit of a suspect without having to then repair the damage made.
https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/greenwood-village-h...
Another case taken on by the same group, Institute for Justice!
It's a nasty little tool that became huge during the 1980's cut-all-budgets-but-war-on-drugs era.
The public LOVED it because it was used to nail all those drug kingpins... (remember all the ferraris and speedboats the undercover cops had on Miami Vice. It wasn't fiction)
Exactly. Now that the War on Drugs is thankfully over, this tool is being used on everyday Americans who are not criminals. It should be outlawed.
This is the problem with nodding yes to laws that will “only affect the bad people!”. If the law is ineffective, or if the law is effective and they run out of bad people to enforce it on - guess who they are coming after?!
> guess who they are coming after?!
The enablers either individually or demographically are low on the list. That's the problem, people feel justified being enablers because they rightly surmise the risk to them personally is low.
People love it when laws don’t matter unless they are affected.
It's easy to trust, when you've never been a victim. - Face to Face, Disconnected
And qualified immunity. It's not an excuse for plebs to be ignorant of the law, but if it's not spelled out word for word to the police, they get to claim that obviously heinous violations of rights were not "clearly established boundaries" and get off completely scot-free. Rules for thee but not for me.
And it is a violation of the 4th Amendment for it to even exist in the first place.
The fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
They're being sneaky and skirting around it by charging objects with crimes, but everyone knows that is such bullshit that it's the kind of stupid fuckery that would have been pulled in the Spanish Inquisition.
Police in the states steal more than all thieves combined. (The only other category which also steals more than burglars are employers through wage theft.) And that is just based off very incomplete data as we lack transparency into most civil forfeiture at the local municipality level.
The money also does not go back into public service use. It's often funneled into items such as F-350 trucks for personal use, commemorative Super Bowl badges, or premium salmon-jerky dogfood (actual recent examples from Georgia).
Anyone down voting, can you provide proof that proves the opposite?
I know wage theft is massive (world over).
There’s no proof against it because it’s factual. They just don’t like the narrative it forms by pointing it out, or they think it’s justified by the other value police/employers create, or they think the victims had it coming (by committing “time theft” or being criminals themselves even if I convicted because police only go after bad people / they are bad people because police went after them)
Well "wage theft" is also rhetorically abused to go beyond fraud, lack of payments or similiar actual misconduct and into bullshit Marx-tautology territory of "all profit is stolen from the worker". They think it helps spread their point but it really undermines it to anybody who catches on to their bullcrap.
Sorry for the offtopicness, but please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44760952. That thread is a bit old so I want to make sure you get the reply.
Well the statistic I mentioned does not include your Marxist reference and doesn't need to include such a number to hold true. There’s nothing Marxist about it.
Not unexpected. The FBI has generally been a gang filled with thieves for at least 20 years. I'm not old enough to know if it was always like this.
It takes a lot of guts, and some real resources, to fight back when the FBI violates you like this. I never even considered it after some FBI stole all my computers(*1) and then, when 10 years later they gave them back, all my bitcoin was missing (the files and OS and everything there; the wallet was just wiped and replaced w/blank one with no transactions).
ref 1. My apartment was raided and burgled by the FBI as part of a 50+ person cross-country fishing expedition warrant looking for wikileaks members to squash political dissent in 2011. I was never charged with a crime or even indicted.
If you have your public address, you should be able to see if the coin is thieved away.
If so, there are many a lawyer that would pro bono that I presume, especially with the price of bitcoin today.
They replaced the entire wallet. The new wallet has no transactions at all while mine should've had many many dozens. So there were no addresses to check. I certainly didn't memorize them back then.
As for stirring trouble again with a lawsuit: I definitely don't want saurons eye back upon me. I just can't handle that kind of stress. Even if I'm in the right and it'd be a life changing amount of money. Even posting about it here on HN makes my anxiety spike and me start sweating. Just typing this kind of thing in public is risky.
It takes a strong person to stand up to the FBI. I wish Linda Martin all the luck and support. Hopefully they don't use her fighting back as a reason to target her for more harassment.
> I certainly didn't memorize them back then.
If you obtained or spent the bitcoin with a company or person that you are still able to contact, you should be able to get an address.
And that would also validate control of the same address at some point.
One thing to bear in mind is that it could have been a contractor who worked for the FBI. Someone at an external firm hired to do the job. Or just a tech at the FBI.
The FBI would still be liable, but would also potentially point their ire at the thief and criminal who did so, under contract.
A law firm might pro-bono the detective work, to see just who spent that coin, if anyone did.
"The process is the punishment" comes to mind. Not everyone is cut out to be a fighter and it's a shame that so many people end up needing to be one just to live their lives.
Why would the FBI "take" your wallet without the password?
Just to be petty? Why would someone assume you didn't have a backup?
I'd guess some bug in your wallet app zeroed it out, if this even happened.
Why'd the FBI take your computers?
Did you notice the wikileaks mention?
Sure, but why was OP targeted?
Yeah. In theory, the Constitution very clearly says that that kinda stuff is utterly verboten.
In practice, the Courts (supposedly sworn to uphold that Constitution) will happily accept 'most any hare-brained theory, so long is the bottom line is that the gov't and its chums are free to do as they wish unto the weak and expendable.
And this situation is nothing like unique to the past 2-3 decades. Nor to the Federal gov't. Nor to the US of A. I'd bet it was SOP in most places, back when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi was first being written down.
Sorry, but I can't simply believe an account like this. Did you sue them to recover the damages?
Your privilege is showing.
I can never tell if it's far left or far right, they use the same hyperbole. They even hate the same people.
USA, the land of the free!
It's a holdover from Europe, which means most countries in the world have a form of it. Mexico, that socialist, gun-control utopia, is probably the best example. If another country besides the US ever gets something like PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) from the 1980s, they would have a clue.
Ignorance is bliss, but the US is probably still better.
Are you trying to say that most countries have something similar to civil asset forfeiture?
If so, that's absolutely wrong.
Yes that's my claim, as defined in Mexican law since that's more like most countries' legal systems.
I don't know so my claim is weak, my Wikipedia articles on non-US legal systems is extremely slow going, and I have not written articles on this particular topic outside the US. :( The real basis of my claim is that most of the world would be expected to have judicial procedures for seizing assets more akin to our CAF. What the US considers reduced rights, like no jury trial, is just how things are elsewhere. (Ain't no one with a right to a jury trial anywhere in the world ever gonna choose a bench trial, it's that much of a difference.)
The most prominent feature of the US asset forfeiture isn't that it's ruled by bench trial.
Is it the standard of proof?
Preponderance (US), Balance of Probabilities (CA, UK, Ireland, SG, AU, NZ, PH, SA, NG), extinción de dominio (MX, CO, BR)?
It is that the asset can be forfeit before a judicial decision. And as a second, that there is no requirement to involve the asset owner in a judicial proceeding.
Civil forfeiture is a hot topic all over the world. But the US has Executive forfeiture in practice.
> in practice
One of the differences is that the US has PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), that in practice we have a clue. Since the 80s. It adds up.
whoever told you that is your enemy
As bad as CAF is I wouldn’t say it’s directly impinging on “freedom”. In fact it may be preferable to arresting a person in some cases so that could be said to be an argument in favor.
As long as it doesn’t happen to you, am I right? Surely theft by government without trial only happens to those that deserve it
It may be preferable to lose your property in exchange for not getting arrested, but that's like saying I'd rather get pickpocketed than beaten and robbed. Most people would rather their legal property remain their legal property.
Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
> Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
Are you ignorant or a troll? This isn't an either/or situation of course. You could also be an ignorant troll.
> Are you ignorant or a troll? … You could also be an ignorant troll.
I'm a significant Wikipedian, so maybe.
> Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
No. They are independent and serve different purposes. Criminal fines are meant to be taken against legally possessed assets. When someone steals $10 million dollars, the $10 million dollars is seized via civil asset forfeiture. Hence when National Propaganda Radio reports some white collar criminal was fined $10,000 dollars for stealing $10 million dollars, what they're not telling you is that the $10 million dollars is going to be seized via a civil judicial process, regardless of any criminal judicial process. Otherwise it's easy to be confused when white collar criminals almost always get fines less than they stole. All criminals would have to do is steal more than the maximum fine, and NPR happily lets massive amounts of leftists think so.
Okay, and what if I pull out $10,000 cash from my bank, hop on a flight somewhere to buy a car from someone a few states over with the plan of driving my newly-purchased car home, but the TSA accuses the cash of being drug money and turns it over to the police?
If they give you a notice of seizure, then you must file an administrative claim for the assets, and if need be join the subsequent court case as a claimant. (You will be using what Americans would consider reduced rights compared to a criminal trial, but what the rest of the world considers normal rights.) If they don't give notice, file a civil action and Rule 41(g) motion, and probably make a pretty penny from quite a few people. This is not rocket science, it's well worn and has been developed over hundreds of years. ChatGPT can provide all the paperwork for the entire case in a few minutes. If you don't have any money, the judge will assign a lawyer not because you will have a right to it but because they really, really don't want to talk to plebs.
> National Propaganda Radio
Anyone who writes things like that reveals that they are, in fact, just an ignorant troll. Thanks for confirming, I'll try to remember to ignore your comments in the future.
Well I guess that means you're not a Hoax News habitue. But you might as well add Wikipedia government and law articles to your ignore list. (In my defense, I wrote a lot of them a long time ago.)
Taking your stuff is indeed infringing upon freedom, and money is indeed "stuff". And money is how you pay for food, and housing, so doubly infringing.
Congratulatulions, you're in the running for Apology of the Year.
Wut, it is very directly impinging on freedom.
The real lesson here is you can use mental gymnastics to interpret the constitution any way you want. As such, judges are inherently political actors.
Civil asset forfeiture should be a direct and obvious breach of the Fourth Amendment, specificially "unreasonable search and seizure" but no, the law has contorted civil asset forfeiture to be OK because money is property and property has no constitutional rights.
The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property. The police as an institution began as slave catchers (ie returning slaves, being "property", to their owners). Even the FBI has its origin in the Mann Act [1], also known as the White Slave Traffic Act. Basically, it was anti-misagenation.
More generally, if you look at any important course case, mainly Supreme Court precedents, just look at a decision with the lens of how the wealthy will benefit and you'll be able to prodict the outcome with at least a 90% accuracy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mann_Act
The police are muscle that applies violence to advance the interests of the state. They only protect the wealthy insofar as that serves the interest of the state. The interests of the wealthy are generally fairly aligned with the state for various reasons. There is a subtle but important distinction between that and "serving the rich".
> They only protect the wealthy insofar as that serves the interest of the state.
In a capitalist society, that's tautological. The interests of the wealthy are the interests of the state.
>The police exist to protect the wealthy and their property.
As a thought experiment, what would happen if they existed to protect the inverse segment and their property?
The inverse would be to use the monopoly on violence to punish those who wish to use property for their self-interest at the expense of the common good.
Basically imagine police throwing in jail people who declare a plot of land as belonging to them, or someone who has seized the means of production and is now pocketing all the profits.
So basically bandit kings who declare greed is the ultimate sin because it denies them their "rightful" earnings?
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“Why me?”, she may well have asked…
Civil forfeiture is one of those things that makes my blood boil every time I read about it. It is so unconstitutional, if not literally then in spirit, that I simply cannot understand how we as a society have continued to put up with it.
Because the victims are often enough "bad people", so it's politically easy to sell to the masses.
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People have been crying foul about civil asset forfeiture for decades.
However nothing has been done yet because it’s yet another tool used to control the population. The current powers in government and their billionaire owners do not want civil asset forfeiture to disappear.
Thus part of the reason we are stuck in this endless "culture war" when we should be aiming our frustration at the billionaire class.
It has nothing to do with billionaire owners. It was "law and order" agenda that has literally zero to do with them.