Taken - The New Yorker. Clockwise from left: James Morrow, Javier Flores, Jennifer Boatright and her son Jacob, Dale Agostini, and Nelly Moreira. Many police budgets depend on money from forfeiture. Credit Photographs by Ashley Gilbertson / VIIOn a bright Thursday afternoon in 2. Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar- and- grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U. S. 5. 9 toward Linden, Henderson. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson.
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Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read . When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey- blond . The same police car that their eleven- year- old had admired in the mini- mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull- shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.
He asked if Henderson knew that he. When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.
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The officers found the couple. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, . Russell, arrived an hour later.
Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for .
Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. She was standing at a mattress- size grill outside. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, cops drive a Cadillac Escalade stencilled with the words . Hundreds of state and federal laws authorize forfeiture for cockfighting, drag racing, basement gambling, endangered- fish poaching, securities fraud, and countless other misdeeds.
In general, you needn. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner. One Pearl Necklace and United States v. Approximately 6. 4,6. Pounds of Shark Fins. A piece of property does not share the rights of a person.
Owners who wish to contest often find that the cost of hiring a lawyer far exceeds the value of their seized goods. Washington, D. C., charges up to twenty- five hundred dollars simply for the right to challenge a police seizure in court, which can take months or even years to resolve. The tangled nature of the process became clear when I spoke to Nelly Moreira, a stout, curly- haired custodian who lives in Northwest D. C. Moreira relied on her 2.
Honda Accord to drive from her early- morning job, cleaning Trinity Washington University, to her evening job, cleaning the U. S. In March, 2. 01. He was arrested, and her car was seized.
Moreira, who grew up in El Salvador, explained in Spanish that she received a letter in the mail two months later asking her to pay a bond of one thousand and twenty dollars. Desperate, she borrowed cash from friends and family to cover the bond, which is known in D.
C. But all that the money bought her was the right to a complex and slow- moving civil- forfeiture court case. She was left struggling to make her car payments each month as her Honda sat in a city lot, unused and unsheltered from the elements. The bond, the loans, and the public- transportation costs added up.
Describing the policy as . At a public hearing on July 1.
D. C. But he warned that millions of dollars raised by forfeiture . He proposed more modest changes that would leave the current burden of proof untouched.
Over the past year, I spoke with more than a hundred police officers, defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, and forfeiture plaintiffs from across the country. Many expressed concern that state laws designed to go after high- flying crime lords are routinely targeting the workaday homes, cars, cash savings, and other belongings of innocent people who are never charged with a crime.
When Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson complained to the county in the hope of retrieving their savings, they got another surprise. Lynda Russell, the district attorney, told them she had warned . Once again, their custody of the kids was threatened. Boatright and Henderson decided to fight anyway. Often they were referred to a defense attorney named David Guillory, in nearby Nacogdoches. Guillory is a broad- faced man with blue eyes and the gregarious, cheerful disposition of a Scoutmaster. He specialized in cases around the state that made neither friends nor profits: mostly, suing policemen for misconduct.
By the time Boatright and Henderson spoke with Guillory, he was already acquainted with what he refers to as . In August, 2. 00. Tenaha police pulled Morrow over for . Morrow told Guillory that he was on his way to get dental work done at a Houston mall. When he finally agreed to sign away his property, he was released on the side of the road with no money, no vehicle, and no phone. He says that a Tenaha officer told him, .
The money always stays here. He was taken aback by the scale of what he uncovered.
It was a baroque small- town scandal, but it was also a story with national reach. He wondered how many people across the country felt . An officer announced, . When I visited her this spring, she sat beside her seventy- year- old husband, who was being treated for pancreatic cancer, and was slumped with exhaustion. A little earlier, he had struggled to put on his embroidered blue- and- yellow guayabera shirt; his wife, looking fit for church in a green jacket, tank top, and slacks, watched him attentively as he shuffled over on a carved- wood cane to greet me.
Leon explained his attachment to their home in numerical terms. Leon had been hired as a cook at the Valley Forge Music Fair, outside Philadelphia, where James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and the Kingston Trio would one day perform.
After renting a room in the city, the Adamses found a sweet little two- story house within their budget, five miles from Philadelphia. It had a narrow covered porch that reminded Mary Adams of the country. The home served the Adams family well over the next half century, as Leon took a job as a steel- plant worker, and later as an elementary- school janitor, and Mary worked as a saleswoman at Woolworth and, eventually, as a patients. At thirty- one, slender and goateed, Leon, Jr., occupied a small bedroom on the second floor.
When his father, who had already suffered a stroke, fell ill with cancer, he was around to help out. But, according to a report by the Philadelphia Police Department, the younger Leon had a sideline: on the afternoon of July 1. When the informant requested two more deals the next week, the report said, he made the same arrangements. Both were for twenty dollars, purchased with marked bills provided by police. Around 5 p. m. One of the officers placed Leon, Jr., in handcuffs and said, . Owing to the allegations against Leon, Jr., the state was now seeking to take the Adamses. All of this could occur even if Leon, Jr., was acquitted in criminal court; in fact, the process could be completed even before he stood trial.
Mary Adams was at a loss. She and her husband were accused of no crime. Instead, the civil case was titled Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. The Real Property and Improvements Known as . For years, Mary had volunteered for the Philadelphia More Beautiful Committee, and as a block captain she always thought that civil forfeiture was reserved for crack houses and abandoned eyesores.
Now her own carefully maintained residence was the target. The Adamses had a lucky break on the morning of their eviction notice: when an officer observed Leon. This gave them some time to figure out how to fight.
But they learned of a free . Beside him sat Susanna Greenberg, a colleague, and Julia Simon- Mishel, who had worked on the Adamses.
Rulli noted that the system is designed to defeat anyone who isn. Although the city auctioneer reports that about a hundred properties are successfully seized and sold each year, Grossman says the city prefers to work out settlements that would allow families to stay in their homes. In the Colonial period, the English Crown issued . As the legal scholars Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen have noted, these writs were . It was easier to prosecute a vessel and seize its cargo than to try to prosecute its owner, who might be an ocean away. In the ensuing decades, the practice fell into disuse and, aside from a few brief revivals, remained mostly dormant for the next two centuries.
Forfeiture in its modern form began with federal statutes enacted in the nineteen- seventies and aimed not at waitresses and janitors but at organized- crime bosses and drug lords. Law- enforcement officers were empowered to seize money and goods tied to the production of illegal drugs. Later amendments allowed the seizure of anything thought to have been purchased with tainted funds, whether or not it was connected to the commission of a crime. Even then, forfeiture remained an infrequent resort until 1. Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act. It established a special fund that turned over proceeds from forfeitures to the law- enforcement agencies responsible for them. Local police who provided federal assistance were rewarded with a large percentage of the proceeds, through a program called Equitable Sharing.
Soon states were crafting their own forfeiture laws. Revenue gains were staggering. At the Justice Department, proceeds from forfeiture soared from twenty- seven million dollars in 1. In 1. 98. 9, Attorney General Richard Thornburgh boasted, .
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