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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.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday February 21 2019, @06:52PM (2 children)
Need some lawyers / legal experts here. I remember talking to my lawyer brother about this general topic years ago. IIRC, he said the Constitutional "due process" is interpreted to _only_ apply to criminal, not civil cases. I don't think the US Constitution makes any such distinction. Anyone know?
I get where you're going with this, but I worry about abuse. Someone could "conveniently" be unavailable: "all tied up", "indisposed", "hospitalized", etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 22 2019, @03:32AM (1 child)
I guess I would recommend this [cornell.edu] for a discussion of due process.
The exact wording is "deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law," and it is found in both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, and therefore applies explicitly to both the federal and state governments. I suspect your friend might have been oversimplifying; the distinction is not between criminal and civil cases, but rather between cases in which the government is a party, and those in which it is not. Since the government is always a party in a CAF case, due process needs to apply, and therefore the government, constitutionally speaking, cannot take the property first and force the citizen to sue to get it back, but rather must bring a case against the citizen (presumably a criminal one) and only then take the property if successful. To be absolutely clear, there is no fundamental problem with the government seizing property that was used in a crime; they just need to win the criminal case first. (There is still a potential problem, in that the property in question might not have belonged to the criminals, and might have been used without the owner's knowledge or permission).
Even if your claim were correct, in the most common abuse, the government declares that the property was used in a crime, and therefore the seizure is necessarily part of a criminal proceeding, even if civil rules are used in the actual forfeiture case.
The original (and valid) use of CAF was for property for which there was no identifiable owner to deprive, such as if the Navy or Coast Guard captures a pirate ship, but not the actual pirates. They could then use CAF against the pirate ship. Or perhaps thieves steal a gun, file off the serial numbers, and use the gun in a crime. The gun has an owner, but nobody knows who it is, so it's reasonable for the government to seize the gun. The concern that the government might declare someone "conveniently unavailable" is... well, in the post-Patriot Act environment, not a totally unreasonable concern, but generally I think the legal system is well-equipped to identify the owner of property if such determination can be made. In a case such as this one, there's absolutely no question as to who the owner is especially given titling and licensing rules surrounding automobiles.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday February 25 2019, @12:31AM
An additional problem is that the government was suing the property itself even when they knew exactly who it belonged to in order to remove their rights from the equation. Convenient unavailability would be a near certainty in a climate where they're willing to abuse an ancient law that badly in the first place.