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What is the likely outcome if a victim of civil forfeiture were to file a lawsuit against the law enforcement body for restitution, on constitutional grounds? Is that legally possible, or is there a precedent for this?

Seems like the ACLU would be all over funding such a suit and taking it as far as necessary.




The likely outcome is that it costs you more than the property which is at stake. It's not that you won't win, it's that it's too expensive to even try!

TFA mentions seizing entire houses? I assume those cases do get filed and won since there's enough at stake. But there's a reason the cops "go for the flat screens" it's a calculated cost/benefit designed to make it just expensive enough to not be worth fighting.

This is why we need large punitive damages awards, but my guess is the law is written specifically to preclude that.


But surely that's built into the structure of the legal system? People I do business with don't routinely defraud me of amounts too small to sue over: why can't the same legal reasoning apply to these cases?


One reason people (and particularly businesses) tend to not defraud you over amounts too small to sue over is that the value of continued business and/or word of mouth is larger than the one-time payout of defrauding you. This effect is obviously diminished when dealing with the state, since the difference in physical power between the two parties in the transaction is immense, and the idea of you ceasing to do business with the state is mostly nonsensical.


> [...] and the idea of you ceasing to do business with the state is mostly nonsensical.

Why? You can move away. (Or, more likely, a bad reputations will deter people and businesses considering moving in.)


All I mean is that the cost of moving to the jurisdiction of another government is generally massive compared to the cost of switching business partners in most situations.


And when all the state you can move to are like this to some degree or other? Moving countries is not simple and certainly out of reach of the majority of the people these laws impact.


Do people actually behave along these lines? Vast majority of people in most places live and die within the same region they were born in. Most people who move countries do so to follow jobs around or get new jobs. The number of people who select countries (that I've heard, at least) for political reasons is negligible. Tho I could see the argument in the extreme case. Cuba and Iraq don't exactly have sizable numbers of immigrants, with their fairly poor political reputations.


The effects are mostly on the margin, but they are there.

Eg when I might be on the fence between two jobs, so I take the politics into discount.


States which are less likely to rob their citizens should see an influx of people and businesses. But then again, most people just assume it won't happen to them. The people that are actively managing to reduce this particular risk may not be the peeps you actually want moving in.

So I guess in a perverse way there's a disincentive to fix the problem in just certain jurisdictions.


> People I do business with don't routinely defraud me of amounts too small to sue over

Then you're lucky, because it happens all the time in a lot of industries.


They don't do that to you because they're concerned for their reputations, for the most part.

I have seen business people that operate like that however, with little regard for their reputation. They screw other people over a lot, and are willing to run the calculation on the cost to sue them vs what the property or contract or whatever is worth.




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