Its a crime

You will have to believe me, if it matters.  

The public has recently begun to notice that police seizure of the property of people accused of crime seems a little unfair.  These people need their bank accounts to hire legal defense.  

It also seems unfair because they are being treated as guilty of a crime before there is a trial.

I started saying this was unconstitutional behavior in the early 1970’s soon after the RICO act was passed.  The trouble is that blogs and the Internet didn’t exist to record my opposition to this preposterous legal behavior.  I never put it into a book, because it is an issue of justice that has little impact on me or anyone I know.  The people I complained to about this injustice didn’t pay much attention at the time and certainly won’t remember now, how often I said it.

But it probably only matters to me, that I realized what a great injustice this is, long ago.

This seizure of assets before trial was initiated by the RICO act of 1970 and by similar state acts a few years later.  

The argument at the time was that the Italian Mafia was so powerful and potent that this unfair seizure of their assets was necessary to reign them in.  This argument was widely accepted because the Italian Mafia story of awesome power was widely believed. It was only partially true. Partially, because of Italian influence in the world of the unions that were powerful in some areas.  Anti-union sentiment wasn’t strong at the time.

The unfair seizure laws quickly moved into the realm of drug prosecution.   Again, a group of people that had no sympathy from the general public.

Every American can say: ‘First they came for the Jews, then for the Quakers ….., and finally they came for me.’  But it is meaningless because ‘first they came for the Italian-union-Mafia, then they came for drug dealers,... ‘ never gets generalized to ‘finally they came for me’.

But the aphorism is true.  Finally they came for middleclass homeowners and now we are concerned about it.  Forty years too late to remedy the fundamental injustice.

Frankly, it is a crime in my mind and a blatant abuse of the 4th and 5th Amendments to the Constitution to seize someones assets before a trial and before a guilty verdict.

A close friend of mine was a criminal defense lawyer in the late 1970’s and never lost any of her 114  marijuana cases.  She had a rule, because of the asset seizure laws.  When you know you are going to be arrested, you better bury a bag with $5000 in cash in it in my backyard so I can be your lawyer.

That was 35 years ago.

Asset seizure before trial is still a crime in my mind.  For any crime.  Including the IRS;  that is a prolific user of this outrageous injustice.