Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 7, 1993 TAG: 9308090231
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Bob Leweke
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
However, you did not mention another serious consequence of America's war on illegal drug use: police victimization of property owners through asset-forfeiture laws. Police and sheriff's departments across the country have been armed by Congress and state legislatures with laws allowing them to seize the property of any citizen if that property is believed by the authorities to have been involved in illegal drug activity. In direct violation of the fifth amendment to the Constitution, the property may be seized without charges being placed against the victim. The property is often kept by the law enforcement agency without so much as a trial.
The Fifth Amendment states: "No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . . ." This cause is one of the most important in the Bill of Rights. It was meant, in part, to prevent the government from taking property, without a trial to prove criminal activity on the part of the property owner. Yet, in the name of the drug war, police and sheriff's departments are filling their coffers with the property and cash they have stolen from people convicted of no crime.
Probably the most well-known abuse of this police power is the Donald Scott case. In 1992, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department obtained a warrant to search the home of multi-millionaire Donald Scott for a suspected cache of marijuana. The warrant was based on aerial surveillance of the property, witness testimony and other evidence. (The Ventura County district attorney later determined that the sheriff's department had withheld contradictory evidence and testimony to obtain the warrant.) On the morning of Oct. 2, law-enforcement officers broke into Scott's home, armed with weapons and the search warrant.
Recovering from recent eye surgery and half-asleep, he emerged from a bedroom and confronted the armed men in his house with a .38-caliber revolver. Scott failed to obey commands to drop the gun and a deputy shot him twice in the chest, killing him. The search of the house and property turned up no illegal drugs.
The district attorney's report cited California's asset-forfeiture law as a driving force behind the search. The report criticized the leader of the investigation that led to the raid. The report said the investigator, a sheriff's deputy, "knew that if marijuana were found growing, or if narcotics were found in sufficient quantity, it was possible that a very valuable piece of real estate would be forfeited to the government with the proceeds of a sale going to the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department."
This outrageous example of the abuse of police power has been cited as only one of the most recent cases illustrating the need for reform of asset-forfeiture laws. The news media, including a 1991 investigative series in The Pittsburgh Press, have increasingly told the stories of private homes, land, cars, trucks, boats and cash that have been seized by law-enforcement agencies. The series in the Press reported that property owners in federal and state forfeiture cases were usually not charged with a crime.
Predictably, the main barrier to reform is opposition by law-enforcement agencies for obvious reasons. First, asset forfeiture is an excellent way for police and sheriff's offices to get money for department expenses without increasing taxes.
Second, in a civil forfeiture case, officials may seize property when they have "probable cause" that it was obtained with the profits from illegal drug activity or would have been used to commit a drug crime. It is the government's good fortune to automatically keep the asset unless the property owner challenges the seizure within 30 days and posts a cost bond equal to 10 percent of the property's value. So much for due process of law.
Third, if the case does go to trial, the burden of proof is on the prosecution. But it only needs to prove a "preponderance of the evidence," a lighter standard than "beyond a reasonable doubt" in criminal cases.
Fourth, even if the government loses the case, it does not have to pay the owner for damages or legal expenses. The owner, however, must continue to pay interest, taxes and other expenses associated with the property during the resolution of the case.
Given these incentives, why shouldn't the authorities seize any property, however flimsy the evidence? Wealthy people are a tempting target, and people of modest means often can't afford the cost of getting their property back. Even in those cases in which the property owner is innocent, the government knows that the barriers the owner must surmount to retrieve his or her property are very hard to overcome. It's no wonder law-enforcement officials oppose reform of these Orwellian statutes.
These police abuses are in part caused by the government's success in propagandizing its response to the drug problem in such a way that the public can easily swallow the violation of our basic constitutional rights. According to the government, the struggle is a "war." Now that the Soviet Union is gone, cocaine producers in Columbia, drug traffickers in Central America and drug pushers in the streets of American cities are "the enemy," and they are to be fought with harsh military measures and long mandatory prison sentences. As the editorial pointed out, these tactics have been ineffective and worse, destructive. Are Americans so in need of having an enemy to fight that we must make victims of innocent citizens in the name of the drug war?
For decades, The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that in times of war even freedom of speech may be curbed in order to protect the survival of the nation. But now, police and sheriff's departments are profiting from our declaration of war on illegal drugs. The casualties are not foreign enemies but are ourselves and our basic freedoms.
by CNB