Pubdate: Sun, 20 May 2012
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2012 The Washington Post Company
Contact: http://mapinc.org/url/mUgeOPdZ
Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: George F. Will

WHEN GOVERNMENT GETS GREEDY

TEWKSBURY, Mass. - Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: "What country are
we in?" He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare
unfolding in Orwellian language.

This town's police department is conniving with the federal government
to circumvent Massachusetts law - which is less permissive than
federal law - to seize his livelihood and retirement asset.

In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street,
Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object,
the motel Caswell's father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of
Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give
up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose
budget is just $5.5 million.

The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a
crime.

They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what
is antiseptically called the "equitable sharing" of the fruits of
civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is
indistinguishable from robbery.

The Merrimack River Valley near the New Hampshire border has had more
downs than ups since the 19th century, when the nearby towns of Lowell
and Lawrence were centers of America's textile industry.

In the 1960s the area briefly enjoyed a high-tech boom. Caswell's
"budget" motel, too, has seen better days, as when the touring Annette
Funicello and the Mouseketeers checked in. In its sixth decade the
motel hosts tourists, some workers on extended stays and some elderly
people who call it home. The 56 rooms rent for $56 a night or $285 a
week.

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on
drug-dealing charges.

Even if those police figures are accurate - the police have a
substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate - these 30 episodes
involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell
has rented over those more than 6,700 days. Yet this is the
government's excuse for impoverishing the Caswells by seizing this
property, which is their only significant source of income and all of
their retirement security.

The government says the rooms were used to "facilitate" a
crime.

It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to
know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil
forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to
prove their innocence - to prove they did everything possible to
prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What
counts as possible remains vague.

The Caswells voluntarily installed security cameras, they photocopy
customers' identifications and record their license plates, and they
turn the information over to the police, who have never asked the
Caswells to do more.

The Caswells are represented by the Institute for Justice, a
libertarian public-interest law firm. IJ explains that civil
forfeiture is a proceeding in which property is said to have acted
wrongly. This was useful long ago against pirates, who might be out of
reach but whose ill-gotten gains could be seized.

The Caswells, however, are not pirates.

Rather, they are victims of two piratical governments that, IJ argues,
are violating the U.S. Constitution twice.

They are violating the Eighth Amendment, which has been construed to
forbid "excessive fines" that deprive individuals of their
livelihoods. And the federal "equitable sharing" program violates the
10th Amendment by vitiating state law, thereby enabling Congress to
compel the states to adopt Congress's policies where states possess a
reserved power and primary authority - in the definition and
enforcement of the criminal law.

A federal drug agent operating in this region roots around in public
records in search of targets - property with at least $50,000 equity.
Caswell thinks that if his motel "had a big mortgage, this would not
be happening."

"Equitable sharing" - the consensual splitting of ill-gotten loot by
the looters - reeks of the moral hazard that exists in situations in
which incentives are for perverse behavior.

To see where this leads,
read IJ's scalding report "Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil
Asset Forfeiture" (http://ow.ly/aYME1), a sickening litany of law
enforcement agencies padding their budgets and financing boondoggles
by, for example, smelling, or imagining to smell, or pretending to
smell, marijuana in cars they covet.

None of this is surprising to Madisonians, which all sensible
Americans are. James Madison warned (in Federalist 48) that government
power "is of an encroaching nature." If unresisted, it produces
iniquitous sharing of other people's property. 
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D