Seizing cash without criminal charges is dead wrong
Published February 13, 2015
Editorial by Winston-Salem Journal, February 12, 2015.
If you can’t prove the crime, you can’t take a dime.
Or at least that’s the way it ought to be in America.
But a case that occurred in Kernersville recently is a textbook example of “Equitable Sharing,” a program in which law-enforcement agencies nationwide confiscate large sums of money or property from individuals who have not been convicted of crimes.
Last May, Kernersville police seized a total of $20,000 in cash from a Kernersville couple, Adrian Martinez-Perez and Teresa Blackburn, the Journal’s Michael Hewlett reported recently. Martinez-Perez was initially charged with resisting arrest and possession of a Schedule II controlled substance, but while the charges were dropped, their money wasn’t returned until after their lawyer filed an injunction.
Martinez-Perez and Blackburn also allege excessive force in a pending lawsuit against five Kernersville police officers and the town of Kernersville. Their attorneys filed a re-sponse denying the allegations.
But since the charges against this couple were dropped, the police had no right to hold onto their money.
The seizures were part of a disturbing nationwide program with the nastily ironic name of “Equitable Sharing.” In January, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. ordered the Department of Justice to cease its Equitable Sharing program, but local law enforcement agencies can continue to make seizures under their own state laws. And the feds can still make their own civil forfeitures.
“While most police officers are great, ‘Equitable Sharing’ incentivizes officers to breach people’s rights so local law enforcement agencies can profit; it is just bad law and bad policy,” the lawyer for Martinez-Perez and Blackburn, Clarke Dummit, told the Journal in an email.
Proponents of Equitable Sharing say their targets are drug dealers and white collar criminals, who mostly deal in cash, and that confiscating money and property – justified by “probable cause” - is a way to curb their activities even when law-enforcement officers can’t prove a crime. Agencies put the money back into their work. But that’s not the way police should operate in a free country.
And there are legitimate reasons for people to carry large sums of money. Martinez-Perez and Blackburn claimed to be in the process of setting up two new businesses. Professional gamblers or other non-conventional business people, such as collectors, sometimes carry large amounts of cash – and some have been victims of Equitable Sharing arrests.
The Washington Post has reported that local and state law-enforcement agencies nation-wide have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under the Equitable Sharing program. In 81 percent of the cases, no indictments were ever filed. Local police kept 80 percent of the money with the rest going to the feds.
It’s hard to imagine a more obscene violation of citizens’ rights than stopping them on a pretext and taking their money. All local participation in this program has to stop.
February 13, 2015 at 12:03 pm
Richard Bunce says:
Just another unacceptable result of the government War On Drugs. Government agencies become addicted to the revenue stream from seizures and are incentivized to come up with more and more circumstances under which they will seize private property.
February 15, 2015 at 11:38 am
Rip Arrowood says:
Kinda like forced pooling? Except gov't seizes private property and gives it to private industry...
February 15, 2015 at 2:24 pm
Richard Bunce says:
I agree, along with eminent domain laws in general. Government should not be able to tell a property owner they cannot extract resources from their property either, just that in doing so they cannot provably harm any other property owner.
