Night Owl 6/Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso/047a/drugwar.zip/DRUG.1

Text File | 1991-08-17 | 12KB | 285 lines

Message #16731 - U_BBS
   Date : 12-Aug-91 12:36
   From : Unknown
     To : All
Subject : "War On Drugs" Atrocities: The Forfeiture Laws
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Not long ago, some folks were speculating that the bad things in the War
on Drugs were just below the attention of the media, and that it might
soon recieve some coverage.

The Pittsburgh Press has just begun a series about the War. I will be
bringing you all the articles, which will come in this week.

Please take the time to read this. I took the time to type it in. Most
of these stories were new to me. They were somewhat wimpy, but at
least its a step in the right direction.


Here is the first articles in the series. All typos are mine. Please
distribute this widely. I have no access to talk.politics.drugs, so
someone may wish to put this there as well.

Shawn


This article appeared in a box on the FRONT PAGE.

The Pittsburgh Press, Sunday, August 11, 1991
------------------------


            P R E S U M E D     G U I L T Y
              The law's Victims in the War on Drugs

It's a strange twist of justice in the land of freedom. A law designed
to give cops the right to confiscate and keep the luxurious poseesions
of major drug dealers mostly ensnares the modest homes, cars and cash
of ordinary, law-abiding people. They step off a plane or answer their
front door and suddenly lose everything they've worked for. They are
not arrested or tried for any crime. But there is punishment, and it's
severe.

This six-day series chronicles a frightening turn in the war on drugs.
Ten months of research across the country reveals that seizure and
forfeiture, the legal weapons meant to eradicate the enemy, have done
enormous collateral damage to the innocent. The reporters reviewed
25,000 seizures made by the Drug Enforcement Administration. they
interviewed 1,600 prosecutors, defense lawyers, cops, federal agents,
and victims. They examined court documents from 510 cases. What thyey
found defines a new standard of justice in America: You are presumed
guilty.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------


The main article appeared next to the above, also on the front page,
and later pages.


-----------------------------------------------------

    Government seizures victimize innocent

By Andrew Schneider
and Mary Pat Flaherty

Part One: The overview

February 27, 1991.
    Willie Jones, a second-generation nursery man in his family's
Nashville business, bundles up money from last year's progits and
heads off to buy floweres and shrubs in Houston. He makes this trip
twice a year using cash, which the small growers prefer.

    But this time, as he waits at the american Airlines gate in Nashvill
Metro Airport, he's flanked by two police officers who escort him into
a small office, search him and seize the $9,600 he's carrying. A
ticket agent had alerted the officers that a large black man had paid
for his ticket in bills, unusual these days. Because of the cash,  and
the fact that he fit a "profile" of what drug dealers supposedly look
like, they believed he was buying or selling drugs.

    He's free to go, he's told. But they keep his money -- his
livelihood -- and give him a receipt in its place.

    No evidence of wrongdoing was ever produced. No charges were
ever filed. As far as anyone knows, Willie Jones neither uses drugs,
nor buys or sells them. He is a gardening contractor who bought an
airplane ticket. Who lost his hard-earned money to the cops. And can't
get it back.

    That same sday, an ocean away in Hawaii, federal drug agents
arrive at the Maui home of retirees Joseph and Frances Lopes and claim
it for the U.S. government.

    For 49 years, Lopes worked on a sugar plantation, living in
its camp housing before buying a modest home for himself, his wife,
and their adult, mentally disturbed son, Thomas.

    For a while, Thomas grew marijuana in the back yard -- and
threatened to kill himslef every time his parents tried to cut it
down. In 1987, the police caught Thomas, then 28. He pleaded guilty,
got probation for his first offense and was ordered to see s
psychologist once a week. He has, and never again has grown dope or
been arrested. The family thought this episode was behind them.

    But earlier this year, a detective scouring old arrest records
for forfeiture opportunities realized the Lopes house could be taken
away because they had admitted they knew about the marijuana.

    The police department stands to make a bundle. If the house is
sold, the police get the proceeds.

    Jones and the Lopes family are among the thousands of
Americans each year victimized by the federal seizure law -- a law
meant to curb drugs by causing financial hardship to dealers.

    A 10-month study by The Pittsburgh Press shows the law has run
amok. In their zeal to curb drugs and sometimes fill their coffers
with the proceeds of what they take, local cops, federal agents and
the courts have curbed innocent Americans' civil rights.  From Maine
to Hawaii, people who are never charged with a crime had cars, boats,
money and homes taken away.

    In fact, 80 percent of the people who lost property to the
federal government were never charged. And most of the seized items
weren't the luxurious playthings of drug barons, but modest homes and
simple cars and hard-earned savings of ordinary people.

    But those goods generated $2 billion for the police
departments that took them.

    The owners' only crimes in many of these cases: They "looked"
like drug dealers. They were black, Hispanic or flashily dressed.

    Others, like the Lopeses, have been connected to a crime by
circumstances beyond their control.

    Says Eric Sterling, who helped write the law a decade ago as a
lawyer on a congressional committee: "The innocent-until-proven-guilty
concept is gone out the window."

The law: Guilt doesn't matter

    Rooted in English common law, forfeiture has surfaced just twice in
the United States since colonial times.

    In 1862, Congress permitted the president to seize estates of
Confederate soldiers. Then, in 1970, it resurrected forfeiture for the
civil war on drugs with the passage of racketeering laws that targeted
the assets of criminals.

    In 1984 however, the nature of the law was radically changed
to allow government to take posession without first charging, let
alone convicting the owner. That was done in an effort to make it
easier to strike at the heart of the major drug dealers. Cops knew
that drug dealers consider prison time an inevitable cost of doing
business. It rarely deters them. Profits and playthings, though, are
their passions. Losing them hurts.

    And there was a bonus in the law. the proceeds would flow back
to law enforcement to finace more investigations. It was to be the
ultimate poetic justice, with criminals financing their own undoing.

    But eliminating the necessity of charging or proving a crime
has moved most of the actionm to civil court, where the government
accuses the item -- not the owner -- of being tainted by a crime.

    This oddity has court dockets looking like purchase orders:
United States of America vs. 9.6 acres of land and lake; U.S. vs. 667
bottles of wine. But it's more than just a labeling change. Because
money and property are at stake instead of life and liberty, the
constitutional safeguards in criminal proceedings do not apply.

    The result is that "jury trials can be refused; illegal
searches condoned; rules of evidence ignored," says Louisville, Ky.
defense lawyer Donald Heavrin. The "frenzied quest for cash," he says,
is "destroyin the judicial system."

    Every crime package passed since 1984 has expanded the uses of
forfeiture, and now there are more than 100 statutes in place at the
state and federal level. Not just for drug cases anymore, forfeiture
covers the likes of money laundering, fraud, gambling, importing
tainted meats and carrying intoxicants onto Indian land.

    The White House, Justice Department and Drug Enforcement
Administration say they've made the most of the expanded law in
getting the big-time criminals, and they boast of seizing mansions,
planes and millions in cash. But the Pittsburgh Press in just 10
months was able to document 510 current cases that involved innocent
people -- or those possesing a very small amount of drugs -- who lost
their possesions.

    And DEA's own database contadicts the official line. It showed
that big-ticket items -- valued at  more than $50,000 -- were only 17
percent of the total 25,297 items seized by DEA during the 18 months
that ended last December.

    "If you want to use that 'war on drugs' analogy, the
forfeiture is like giving the troops permission to loot," says Thomas
Lorenzi, president-elect of the Louisiana Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers.

    The near-obsession with forfeiture continues without any proof
that it curbs drug crime -- its original target.

    "The reality is, it's very difficult to tell what the impact
of drug seizure is," says Stanley Morris, deputy director of the
federal drug czar's ofice.

Police forces keep the take

    The "loot" that's coming back to police forces all over tha
nation has redefined law-enforcement success. It now has a dollar sign
in front of it.

    For nearly eighteen months, undercover Arizona State Troopers
worked as drug couriers driving nearly 13 tons of marijuana from the
Mexican border to stash houses around Tucson. They hoped to catch the
Mexican suppliers and distributors on the American side before the
dope got on the streets.

    But they overestimated their ability to control the
distribution. Almost every ounce was sold the minute they droped it at
the houses.

    Even though the troopers were responsible for tons of drugs
getting loose in Tucson, the man who supervised the setup still
believes it was worthwhile. It was "a success from a cost-benefit
standpoint," says former assistant attorney-general John Davis. His
reasoning: It netted 20 arrests and at least $3 million for the state
forfeiture fund.

    "That kind of thinking is what frightens me," says Steve
Sherick. a Tucson attorney. "The government's thirst for dollars is
overcoming any long-range view of what it is supposed to be doing,
which is fighting crime."

    George Terwilliger III, associate deputy attorney general in
charge of the U.S. Justice Department's program emphasizes that
forfeiture does fight crime, and "we're not at all apologetic about
the fact that we do benefit (financially) from it."

    In fact, Terwilliger wrote about how the forfeiture program
financially benefits police departments in the 1991 Police Buyer's
Guide of Police Chief Magazine.

    Between 1986 and 1990, the U.S. Justice Department genertade
$1.5 billion from forfeiture and estimates that it will take in $500
million this year, five times the maount it collected in 1986.

    District attorney's offices throughout Pennsylvania handled
$4.5 million in forfeitures last year; Allegheny County (ED: Pgh is in
Allegheny County) , $218,000, and the city of Pittsburgh, $191,000 --
up from $9,000 four years ago.

    Forfeiture pads the smallest towns coffers. In Lexana, Kan, a
Kansas City suburb of 29,000, "we've got about $250,000 moving in
court right now," says narcotice detective Don Crohn.

    Despite the huge amounts flowing to police departments, the
are few public accounting procedures. Police who get a cut of the
federal forfeiture funds must sign a form saying merely the will use
it for "law enforcement purposes."

    To Philadelphia police that meant new air conditioning. In
Warren County, N.J., it meant use of a forfeited yellow Corvette for
the chief assistant prosecutor.


{At this point nt the article there is a picture of three people  in
an empty apartment, with the following caption:


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