Night Owl 6/Night Owl's Shareware - PDSI-006 - Night Owl Corp (1990).iso/047a/drugwar.zip/DRUG.2

Text File | 1991-08-17 | 13KB | 296 lines

Message #16732 - U_BBS
   Date : 12-Aug-91 12:36
   From : Unknown
     To : All
Subject : "War On Drugs" Atrocities: The Forfeiture Laws/02
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AREA:U_BBS
@SPLIT: 14 Aug 91 16:44:20 @120/183       535 02/03 +++++++++++
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Judy Mulford, 31, and her 13-year old twins, Chris, left, and Jason,
are down to essentials in their Lake Park, Fla., home, which the
government took in 1989 after claiming her husband, Joseph, stored
cocaine there. Neither parent has been criminally charge, but in April
a forfeiture jury said Mrs. Mulford must forfeit the house she bought
herself with an insurance settlement. The Mulfords have divorced, and
she has sold most of her belongings to cover legal bills. She's asked
for a new trial and lives in the near-empty house pending a decision. }


'Looking' like a criminal


    Ethel Hylton of New York City has yet to regain her financial
independence after losing $39,110 in a search nearly three years ago
in Hobby Airport in Houston.

    Shortly after she arrived from New York, a Houston officer and
Drug Enforcement Administration agent stopped the 46-year-old woman in
the baggage area and told her she was under arrest because a drug dog
had scratched at her luggage. The dog wasn't with them, and when Miss
Hylton asked to see it, the officers refused to bring it out.

    The agents searched her bags, and ordered a strip search of
Miss Hylton, but found no contraband.

    In her purse they found the cash Miss Hylton carried because
she planned to buy a house to escape the New York winters which
exasperated her diabetes. It was the settlemet from an insurance
claim, and her life's savings, gatherd through more than 20 years of
work as a hotle housekeeper and hospital night janitor.

    The police seized all but $10 of the cash and sent Miss Hylton
on her way, keeping the money bacause of its alleged drug connection.
But they never charged her with a crime.

    The Pittsburgh Press verified her jobs, reviewed her bank
statements and substantiated her claim she had $18,000 from an
insurance settlement. It also found no criminal record for her in New
York City.

    With the mix of outrage and resignation voiced by other
victims of searches, she says: "The money they took was mine. I'm
allowed to have it. I earned it."

    Miss Hylton bacame a U.S. citizen six years ago. She asks,
"Why did they stop me? Is it bacause I'm black or bacause I'm
Jamaican?"

    Probably, both -- although Houston police haven't said.

    Drug teams interviewed in dozens of airports, train stations
and bus terminals and along other major highways repeatedly said they
didn't stop travellers based on race. But a Pittsburgh Press
examination of 121 travellers' cases in which police found no dope,
made no arrest, but seized money anyway showed that 77 percent of the
people stopped were black, Hispanc, or Asian.

    In April, 1989, deputies from Jefferson Davis Parish,
Louisiana, seized $23,000 from Johnny Sotello, a Mexican-American
whose truck overheated on a highway.

    They offered help, he accepted. They asked to search his
truch. He agreed. They asked if he was carrying cash. He said he was
because he was scouting heavy equipment auctions.

    They then pulled a door panel from the truck, said the space
behind it could have hidden drugs, and seized the money and the truck,
court records show. Police did not arrest Sotello but told him he
would have to go to court to recover his property.

    Sotello sent auctioneer's receipts to police which showed he
was a licensed buyer. the sherriff offered to settle the case, and
with his legal bills mounting after two years, Sotello accepted. In a
deal cut last March, he got his truck, but only half his money. The
cops kept $11,500.

    i was more afraid of the banks than anything -- that's one
reason I carry cash," says Sotello. "But a lot of places won't take
checks, only cash, or cashier's checks for the exact amount. I never
heard of anybody saying you couldn't carry cash."

    Affadavits show the same deputy who stopped Sotello routinely
stopped the cars or balck and Hispanic drivers, exacting "donations"
from some.

    After another of the deputy's stops, two black men from
Atlanta handed over $1,000 for a "drug fund" after being detained for
hours, according to a hand-written receipt reviewed by the Pittsburgh
Press.
    The driver got a ticket for "following to (sic) close." Back
home, they got a lawyer.

    Their attorney, in a letter to the Sherrif's department, said
deputies had made the men "fear for their safety, and in direct
exploitation of tha fear a purported donation of $1000 was
extracted..."

    If they "were kind enough to give the money to the sherrif's
office," the letter said, "hen you can be kind enough to give it
back." If they gave the money "under other circumstances, then give
the money back so we can avoid litigation."

    Six days later, the sherrif's department mailed the men a
$1,000 check.

    Last year, the 72 deputies of Jefferson Davis Parish led the
state in forfeitures, gatering $1 million -- more than their
colleagues in New Orleans, a city 17 times larger than the parish.

    Like most states, Louisiana returns the money to law
enforcement agencies, but it has one of the more unusual
distributions:60 percent goes to the police bringing a case, 20
percent to the district attorney's office prosecuting it and 20
percent to the court fund of the judge signing the forfeiture order.

    "The highway stops aren't much different from a smash-and-grab
ring," says Lorenzi, of the Louisiana Defense Lawyers association.

Paying for your innocence

    The Justice Department's Terwilliger says that in some cases
"dumb judgement" may ocaasionally cause problems, but he believes
there is an adequate solution. "That's why we have courts."

    But the notion that courts are a safeguard for citizens
wrongly accused "is way off," says Tjomas Kerner, a forfeiture lawyer
in Boston. "Compared to forfeiture, David and Goliath was a fair
fight."

    Starting from the moment that the government serves notice
that it intends to take an item, until any court challenge is
completed, "the government gets all the breaks," says Kerner.

    The government need only show probable cause for a seizure, a
standard no greater than what is needed to get a search warrant. The
lower standard means the government can take a home without any more
evidence than it normally needs to tkae a look inside.

    Clients who challenge the government, says attorney Edward
Hinson of Charlotte, N.C., "have the choice of fighting the full
resources of the U.S. treasury or caving in."

    Barry Colin caved in.

    Kolin watched Portland, Ore., police padlock the doors of
Harvey's, his bar and restaurant for bookmaking on March 2.

    Earlier that day, eight police officers and Amy Holmes Hehn,
the Multnomah County deputy district attorney, had swept into the bar,
shooed out waitresses and customers and arrested Mike Kolin, Barry's
brother and bartender, on suspicion of bookmaking.

    Nothing in the police documents mentioned Barry Kolin, and so
the 40-year-old was stunned when authorities took his business, saying
they believe he knew about the betting. He denied it.

    Hehn concedes she did not have the evidence to press a
criminal case against Barry Kolin, "so we seized the business
civilly."

    During a recess in a hearing on the seizures weeks later, "the
deputy DA says if I paid them $30,000 I could open up again," Kolin
recalls. When the deal dropped to $10,000, Kolin took it.

    Kolin's lawyer, Jenny Cooke, calls the seizure "extortion."
She says: "There is no difference between what the police did to Barry
Kolin or what Al Capone did in Chicago when he walked in and said,
'This is a nice little bar and it's mine.' the only difference is
today they call this civil forfeiture."

Minor crimes, major penalties

    Forfeiture's tremendous clout helps make it "one of the most
effective tools that we have," says Terwilliger.

    the clout, though, puts property owners at risk of losing more
under forfeiture that they would in a criminal case under the same
circumstances.

    Criminal charges in federal and many state courts carry
maximum sentences. But there's no dollar cap on forfeiture, leaving
citizens open to punishment that far exceeds the crime.

    Robert Brewer of Irwin, Idaho, is dying of prostate cancer,
and uses marijuana to ease the pain and nausea that comes with
radiation treatments.

    Last Oct. 10, a dozen deputies and Idaho tax agents walked
into the Brewer's living room with guns drawn and said they had a
warrant to search.

    The Brewers, Robert, 61, and Bonita, 44, both retired form the
postal service, moved from Kansas City, Mo., to the tranquil, wooded
valley of Irwin in 1989. Six months later, he was diagnosed.

    According to police reports, and informant told authorities
Brewer ran a major marijuana operation.

    The drug SWAT team found eight plants in the basement under a
grow light and a half-pound of marijuana. The Brewers were charged
with two felony narcotics counts and two charges for failing to buy
state tax stamps for the dope.

    "I didn't like the idea of the marijuana, but it was the only
thing that controlled his pain," Mrs. Brewer says.

    The government seized the couples five-year-old Ford van that
allowed him to lie down during his twice-a-month trips for cancer
treatment at a Salt Lake City hospital, 270 miles away.

    Now they must go by car.

    "That's a long painful ride for him. His testicles would
sometimes swell up to the size of cantaloupes, and he had to lie down
because of the pain. He needed that van, and the government took it,"
Mrs. Brewer says.

    "It looks like the government can punish people any way it
sees fit."

    The Brewers know nothing about the informant who turned them
in, but informants play a big role in forfeiture. Many of them are
paid, targeting property in return for a cut of anything that is
taken.

    The Justice Department's asset forfeiture fund paid $24
million to informants in 1990 and has $22 million allocated this year.

    Private citizens who snith for a fee are everywhere. Some
airline counter clerks receive cash awards for alerting drug agents to
"suspicious" travellers. The practice netted Melissa Furtner, a
Continental Airlines clerk in Denver, at least $5,800 between 1989 and
1990, photocopies of checks show.

    Increased surveillance, recruitment of citizen-cops, and
expantion of forfeiture sweeps are all part of a take-now,
litigate-later syndrome that builds prosecutors careers, says a former
federal prosecutor.

    "Fedreal law enforcement people are the most ambitious I've
ever met, and to get ahead they need visible results. Visible results
are convictions, and, now, forfeitures," says Don Lewis of Meadville,
Crawford County. (ED: a Pa county north of Pgn by two counties.)

    Lewis spent 17 years as a prosecutor, serving as an assistant
U.S. attorney in Tampa as recently as 1988. He left the Tampa Job --
and became a defense lawyer -- when "I found myslef tempted to do
things I wouldn't have thought about doing years ago."

    Terwilliger insists U.S. attorneys would never be evaluated on
"something as unprofessional as dollars."

    Which is not to say Justice doesn't watch the bottom line.

    Cary Copeland, director of the department' Executive Office
for Asset Forfeiture, says the tried to "squeeze the pipeline" in 1990
when the amount forfeited lagged behind Justice's budget projections.

    He said this was done by speeding up the process, not by doing
"whole lot of seizures."

Ending the Abuse

    While defense lawyers talk of reforming the law, agencies that
initiate forfeiture scarcely talk at all.

    DEA headquarters makes a spectacle of busts like the seizure
of fraternity houses at the University of Virginia in March. But it
refuses to supply detailed information on the small cases that account
for most of its activity.

    Local prosecutors are just as tight-lipped.

    Thomas Corbett, U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania, seals
court documents on forfeitures because "there are just some things I
don't want to publicize. the person whose assets we seize will
eventually know, and who else has to?"

    Although some investigations need to be protected, there is an

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