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Unanimous Supreme Court Strikes a Blow in Favor of Civil Liberties (Limiting Civil Forfeiture)

posted by takyon on Thursday February 21 2019, @03:11AM   
from the kick-back dept.

mhajicek writes:

Supreme Court curbs power of government to impose heavy fines and seize property

In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled to drastically curb the powers that states and cities have to levy fines and seize property, marking the first time the court has applied the Constitution's ban on excessive fines at the state level.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who returned to the court for the first time in almost two months after undergoing surgery for lung cancer, wrote the majority opinion in the case involving an Indiana man who had his Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling $385 of heroin.

"Protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties," Ginsburg wrote. "They can be used, e.g., to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies. They can also be employed, not in service of penal purposes, but as a source of revenue."

Also at National Review, SCOTUSblog, and NPR.

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Original Submission

• This will keep happening This will keep happening (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:34AM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:34AM (#804396)

  Maybe it's just the events of the past couple weeks, but I see this continuing to happen. Not everyone can afford to appeal to the supreme court, and the supreme court won't hear everyone who might. The _rest_, all 98% of them, will still be out their $30 000 vehicle. The people who lost $5000, not having even been accused of a crime, won't even contest it for the price of a lawyer.

  This will keep happening, this ruling doesn't matter. This strikes me as far too lucrative a source of income for states to just give up on someone else's say-so, and the arguments will be the same: that an element used is a crime is subject to forfeiture; the state courts will find the same. Still. That the supreme court says otherwise won't matter.

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• Re:This will keep happening Re:This will keep happening (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @10:56AM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 21 2019, @10:56AM (#804459)

  The law is for the rich.

  Parent

  • Re:This will keep happening (Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:52PM

    by Bot (3902) on Thursday February 21 2019, @12:52PM (#804477) Journal

    Law is equal for everybody.
    Not everybody is equal for the law.

    --
    Account abandoned.

    Parent

  • Who dunnit to whom (Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:03PM

    by fyngyrz (6567) on Thursday February 21 2019, @07:03PM (#804636) Journal

    The law is for the rich.

    ...the law is for whoever it is written to apply to. Which, given how corrupt our legislators are, can be a first order problem. One of the most obvious places we see this is in tax law.

    However, law enforcement, lawyers and courts are all too often also the tools of the rich, which tends to make who the law was written for "for" moot.

    The end result is money trickles upwards, the middle class pays the taxes, and the poor / disenfranchised bottom-most class are created and maintained as a very effective spur to terrify the middle class into perpetrating the system.

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    Schrödinger's smiley: :):

    Parent