Category: Fourth Amendment rights

Time to Slap Grabby Hands

Civil Asset Forfeiture, theft, law enforcement, crime

Is the House of Representatives readying itself to do something to limit civil asset forfeiture initiated by federal agencies?

The legislation has emerged from the Judiciary Committee, so there is hope.

The Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration Act (FAIR) would impose substantial limits on federal civil asset forfeiture — on the power of officers to grab someone’s cash or other belongings on the unsupported suspicion that it was involved in a crime.

Currently, this power to steal based on zero evidence and zero due process remains untrammeled. And forfeited funds thus grabbed can then be spent by the agencies that did the asset-grabbing.

Victims must spend years in the courts to get their stuff back, if they ever do.

FAIR would require “clear and convincing evidence” of wrongdoing. It would also prohibit law-enforcement agencies from being able to spend forfeited funds, eliminating a perverse incentive to rob people naïve enough to be carrying “too much” cash for whatever reason.

At National Review Online, Jill Jacobson says that the bill is “a step in the right direction” but doesn’t go far enough. Arguing on the premise of innocent until proven guilty, she insists “there is no reason why federal law enforcement should be seizing personal property from everyday citizens on tenuous suspicion.”

Or even non-tenuous suspicion, I would add, for not everyone strongly suspected of doing wrong can be proven to have done wrong. And citizens caught on the wrong end of a government official’s steely gaze should not be regarded as a public resource.

The reform isn’t finished until civil asset forfeiture is abolished altogether.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civil asset forfeiture, constitution, crime, police

folly Fourth Amendment rights property rights

Can They Do That?

Zion, Illinois, apartment, inspection, civil liberty

Residential tenants in Zion — and their landlords — can breathe a sigh of relief.

The Zion, Illinois, government can no longer send officials to barge into rented homes at will to conduct obnoxious inspections.

The inspection regime was instituted in 2015 by a mayor who blamed an excess of renters for the town’s financial troubles. The motive for the searches, then, may have been to make it more uncomfortable to rent in Zion. Seriously. As dumb and thuggish as that.

Robert and Dorice Pierce and their landlord were among the victims of this regime.

When an inspector showed up at the Pierces’ door, they told him to get a warrant. But judges don’t generally accept “important to harass tenants” as a reason for issuing warrants. In any case, any respect for constitutional constraints was incompatible with the very nature of these intrusive practices.

So Zion’s response was to threaten the landlord, Josefina Lozano, with daily and mounting fines until she compelled the Pierces to capitulate. That’s when the trio turned to the Institute for Justice and decided to go to court.

This was familiar territory for IJ, which in the 1990s had successfully fought a similar inspection regime in Park Forest, Illinois.

And now, after three years of judicial proceedings, IJ and its clients have secured a consent decree prohibiting the warrantless inspections and prohibiting the fines.

But those who enacted this outrageous regime deserve a reprimand more stern than merely a loss in court.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags civil rights, folly, privacy, property rights

Accountability Fourth Amendment rights international affairs media and media people

Freedom Isn’t the Danger

Justin Trudeau, freedom, authoritarianism

After reading the Honorable Justice Paul Rouleau’s “Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency,” you may demand a palette cleanser.

Matt Taibbi wrote a full article, “The West’s Betrayal of Freedom.”

I’m going to quote an anarchist.

For both Taibbi and me, Justice Rouleau’s bizarre defense of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leveraging of emergency powers to freeze truckers’ bank accounts during last year’s lockdown protests leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

If you have a taste for freedom.

Which people in the news media, as well as in government (but do I repeat myself?), decreasingly demonstrate. Mr. Taibbi, reacting to both Rouleau’s report and mainstream journalistic coverage, notes the general tenor of both, which he says read “like all the tsk-tsking editorials in the West you’ve read since Trump, which used every crisis to hype the idea that freedom = danger.”

Rouleau excuses the tyrannical (anti-protest, anti-free-speech, anti-due-process) Canadian government’s attack upon the truckers because it “met a threshold.” You see, “Freedom cannot exist without order.”

But that’s placing the matter downside up. Freedom provides its own order.

It just so often happens to be an order that tyrants don’t like.

Freedom creates order: when neither you nor I infringe upon the other’s sphere of life, that is an epitome of orderliness. Crime and government (but do I repeat myself?) upset that harmony.

“Liberty,” explained P. J. Proudhon, is “not the daughter but the mother of order.”*

When politicians forget that freedom provides the order we need, they make anarchists look good.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Proudhon, the first major writer to treat “anarchist” as a non-pejorative, was arguably not an Antifa-type anarchist — and the full quotation, presented here on Tuesday, talks about a Republic. Make of that what you will.

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Fourth Amendment rights general freedom tax policy

Not Inadvertent

political donations, IRS, government surveillance, privacy

Maybe we can put a stop to the assault on the privacy of donors to political causes.

By “we” I mean The Buckeye Institute and the Institute for Free Speech, who have teamed up to challenge “a decades-old law that forces the IRS to demand that nonprofit charities hand over the private information of their largest donors every year.”

The IRS itself admits that collecting this personal data “poses a risk of inadvertent disclosure.”

Also a risk of fully advertent disclosure.

The IRS has often been used to harass the political enemies of federal officials in a position to tell the agency what to do.

Buckeye Institute President Robert Alt reports the Institute’s own experience as Exhibit A. In 2013, soon after it had urged Ohio to reject Obamacare-inspired efforts to expand Medicaid, the Institute was subjected to an IRS harassment-audit.

The specter of this investigation was a scary one for the Institute’s major donors, who reasonably assumed that the audit was retaliatory. They worried that if their own names came up during the audit, they too would be subject to IRS attention. Many donors drastically scaled back their giving so they’d be less of a target; others stopped donating altogether.

Prospects for the Institutes’ litigation are good. The U.S. Supreme Court determined in a 2021 ruling that the government must at least consider “the potential for First Amendment harms before requiring that organizations reveal sensitive information about their members and supporters.”

Anonymity in political activism has a long American history — from the start, actually.

It’s what democracy looks like.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags IRS, privacy, surveillance

Fifth Amendment rights Fourth Amendment rights international affairs

The Chinazis Next Door

China, spies, police, Canada, USA, America

The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!

This 1966 comedy about the accidental grounding of a Soviet submarine off the coast of New England was nominated for four Academy Awards and captured the Golden Globe Award for best motion picture.

But a remake exclaiming “The Chinese Are Coming!” would be old hat: They’re already here.

“The People’s Republic of China has opened at least three police stations on Canadian soil as part of an alleged attempt by the country’s security state to keep an eye on the Chinese-Canadian diaspora,” The National Post informed last month.

“Canada-based dissidents of the Beijing government have long warned Canadian authorities that they face organized harassment from Chinese authorities,” The Post added.

A new report by Safeguard Defenders, a Spain-based foundation working for human rights in Asia, reveals there are now 54 of these Chinese “service stations” in 30 countries … including one in New York City.

The organization warns of “China’s growing global transnational repression,” explaining that in the last year 230,000 expats were “persuaded to return” to China but “these returns are often obtained by visiting extreme sanctions on the families of those targeted, such as asset seizures and prohibition from seeking government health care or education.”

In another recent report noted by The Globe and Mail, “the United Nations human-rights office said it found ‘patterns of intimidations, threats and reprisals’ against Uyghurs and other Chinese nationals living overseas who had spoken out against Beijing.”

Just last week, “El Correo published direct corroboration from Chinese authorities” of “illegal policing operations” with an anonymous Chinese official telling the Spanish paper, “The bilateral treaties are very cumbersome, and Europe is reluctant to extradite to China. I don’t see what is wrong with pressuring criminals to face justice.…”

The message to Chinese dissidents is clear: “You’re not safe anywhere.”

Are we?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags China, human rights, police

crime and punishment Fourth Amendment rights general freedom

Fourth Amendment Dead?

Unconstitutional actions are constitutional.

A federal judge doesn’t say so explicitly, but that’s what his ruling amounts to.

The case, which we discussed previously, involves U.S. Private Vaults, a Beverly Hills company that the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided last year. The company has been fined $1.1 million for money laundering because it let dealers anonymously keep cash in its safe deposit boxes.

Judge Gary Klausner concedes that the FBI lied to obtain a warrant, planning to seize the property of all boxholders whether or not there was any evidence of a crime against a given boxholder. And to this day, “specific criminal conduct has not been alleged against customers.” Nevertheless, Klausner ruled that despite the lie, it was constitutional for the FBI to grab the boxes’ contents.

Of course, if the warrant authorizing the FBI to ignore Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures had been honestly solicited, that still would not have transmuted unconstitutional actions into constitutional ones.

“The court does not deny that the government had an improper motive when it applied for its warrant,” observes Rob Johnson, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, which is representing the boxholders.

“But it says that fact is irrelevant unless the improper investigatory motive was the only reason that the Government opened the safety deposit boxes.… If today’s shocking decision stands, it will set a dangerous precedent that will allow the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to bypass the Fourth Amendment.”

Thankfully, the Institute for Justice doesn’t regard the case as closed. It will appeal.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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