yah. Don't carry much cash or jewelry in your car on road trips. Some jurisdictions' police treat the presence of cash / jewelry as evidence of criminal activity. They grab it to defray their budgets. They don't have to obtain a conviction to keep it, and they don't have to give it back.
The Founders forgot to grant voters a check-and-balance role on the 3 branches of government by allowing them to unvote laws that are passed by their duly elected representatives and otherwise tell the various executives and judges across the country that they are doing things wrong. They thought it was enough to let voters focus on securing representatives. They were wrong, and we continue to see the effects of just how well things work for the People when we only get asked to be involved every couple of years.
However, our legislature has a fun little loophole for when they are going to pass a law they know the public will try to repeal through a voter referendum. They add a token appropriation to the bill.
"From 2011 through 2014, unnecessary appropriations shielded a number of controversial bills from voter referendum. That includes right-to-work, the repeal of item pricing, the implementation of emergency managers and myriad anti-union laws."
"This past year, the Senate added a $75,000 appropriation to a bill that would repeal prevailing wage in our state, a practice that guarantees competitive wages to people working on public projects. The pretext? That appropriation was supposedly necessary to “disseminate information” to the public about the new law. The reality? Republicans knew voters would oppose the law."
How is civil forfeiture not a 5th amendment violation?
"... nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
The TLDR is that they are essentially "arresting" the property because it was used in a crime, regardless of who did the crime. The fact that it belonged to someone, often times the person who committed the crime, is sort of irrelevant in the government's opinion.
That's a bit generous of a TL;DR, don't you think?
The reason civil asset forfeiture is controversial is that property can be seized even when a crime has not actually occurred but is merely alleged, and the owner of the property has not been proven guilty of a crime.
There are dirty cops who have taken people's cash on the basis of trumped up charges. This isn't the first time this has been reported on in the US.
> But local and state cops in these states can still use federal law for civil forfeiture.
But does not mention this:
> Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without warrants or criminal charges.
I also have beefs with the way HN works but I think the easier explanation here is that this isn't especially interesting because it's decades old, it's somewhat political which lots of HN users don't like on HN, and it doesn't really provide anything new. The only reason this article exists is because a state got rid of civil asset forfeiture before a conviction a few days ago. So there should really just be a link to that article, which I believe there was days ago.
http://i.imgur.com/kQc13Fy.png