A "property right" is an intangible thing where you can run to a court and say: "X took my Y." You can only assert this if you show ownership of Y. How civil asset forfeiture works is that if an officer has probable cause to believe that property is not lawfully yours, because it's the proceeds of illegal activity, he can seize it. If you contest the seizure, in court, the government has the burden of proof, by preponderance of the evidence, to show that the asset is subject to forfeiture. Preponderance of the evidence is the same burden of proof used in any civil case where the ownership of property is disputed.
The styling of the case, "Florida v. Wool Socks" has nothing to do with the "property being guilty." It's just how in rem proceedings are designated. Such a proceeding is simply one in which the lawful owner of some property is not a party. In the case of civil asset forfeiture the styling is used because the theory is that you're not the rightful owner of the property to begin with. Other contexts where it might be used is if you're enforcing a money judgment against someone who refuses to show up in court by attaching property he owns in your state. It's not that the "property is guilty" just that the case is about the property and the actual owner is absent.
if an officer has probable cause to believe that property is not lawfully yours, because it's the proceeds of illegal activity, he can seize it.
It's more than that, based on my past reading of instances of abuse of this. If the officer believes that the property could in any way be related to a crime, it can be seized. That has nothing to do with whether or not it's lawfully yours. Pretty insane, and could cover basically anything.
Exactly, people have been evicted from their homes because a drug deal took place on the front porch. It doesn't matter that the homeowners' names are on the deed. All that matters is that the house was "used in the commission of a crime". The police often times evict people with only an hour notice, so if you aren't home when they come to evict you, expect every worldly possession you own to disappear forever.
The video backs you up in many different cases. Money is seized from drivers based on the police officer's (preposterous) opinion that it will be used illegally in the future (eg to buy drugs), ignoring the reason and evidence the driver has for the money in the first place.
In Philadelphia they seized houses because of $40 of heroin (son of the owners). And then have courtrooms where this stuff can be contested, but without a judge - only the prosecutor who was involved in the first place.
There's a huge difference between ownership not changing when property itself is stolen, and the preposterous idea that ownership ceases to exist because an item was peacefully obtained using "proceeds of an illegal activity". (I'm not saying that you aren't parroting "logic" espoused by some court somewhere, I'm just pointing out that said court itself is essentially corrupt)
As for the original topic, call me when the perps are in jail. Until then, the "justice system" amounts to nothing more than another gang to be avoided.
Unless you can show me a "property right" under a scanning-tunneling microscope, I submit to you that they're an arbitrarily-defined concept. And as such, it's not "sophistry" to assume one definition of the concept, and proceed from it in a series of logical steps. In this case, the assumption is that the law creates the property right, and the law can take it away, under certain conditions. That's the "forfeiture" part.
"Corruption" refers to when a public entity doesn't follow its own rules. Following a self-consistent set of rules, the premises of which you reject, is not corruption.
Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". The entire point of law is to create distributed consensus. By morphing definitions away from their plain meanings, that entire basis of law is undermined.
Which is exactly what is happening here. In a just society, one is comforted by the belief that if they're stolen from, then the institutions of society will act against (or at least condemn) the perpetrator. In the modern US, the uniformed gangs act with little concern, and then legions of legal "scholars" compose reams of justification for how what occurred was "legitimate".
Either the justice system needs to be reformed and the uniformed thugs sent to jail, or the social contract continues to degrade and we end up with revolution and collapse.
> Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". Your argument essentially boils down to "words in power mean what people in power say they mean". The entire point of law is to create distributed consensus.
No, the point of law is to provide notice of the way the ruler intends to apply power. (Which is, of course, also undermined by lack of clarity in meaning of the law, but in a different way.)
Distributed consensus is the point of democratic government, which is a newer thing than law.
Unlikely. When the contractual change is sufficiently tolerable, society adapts and the idea of property rights morphs along with it. That's less expensive and demeaning than revolutions and collapse. It's an advantage compared to god's law, which is rather a bit harder to change than man's law.
When god's law changes, it classically means war, killing all the males above a certain age, marrying the women and girls off while changing their language and religion - i.e. cultural, and hence deity, decimation. So yeah, watch out for that one.
hence, if the officer decides he doesn't like you he has probably cause. After all he likes "GOOD" people
fuck, I don't care how its worded, its theft and theft by a government to big to give a fuck what you think. they have the police, they have the courts, and you have the right to shut up and eat it.
A "property right" is an intangible thing where you can run to a court and say: "X took my Y." You can only assert this if you show ownership of Y. How civil asset forfeiture works is that if an officer has probable cause to believe that property is not lawfully yours, because it's the proceeds of illegal activity, he can seize it. If you contest the seizure, in court, the government has the burden of proof, by preponderance of the evidence, to show that the asset is subject to forfeiture. Preponderance of the evidence is the same burden of proof used in any civil case where the ownership of property is disputed.
The styling of the case, "Florida v. Wool Socks" has nothing to do with the "property being guilty." It's just how in rem proceedings are designated. Such a proceeding is simply one in which the lawful owner of some property is not a party. In the case of civil asset forfeiture the styling is used because the theory is that you're not the rightful owner of the property to begin with. Other contexts where it might be used is if you're enforcing a money judgment against someone who refuses to show up in court by attaching property he owns in your state. It's not that the "property is guilty" just that the case is about the property and the actual owner is absent.