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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 40.9 ms ] threadEdit: title seems to have been edited since.
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.
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.
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
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.
That same term in law suits is called "venue", when you've filed in the wrong county, for instance.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17395675#17398314
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."
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...