San Diego Cops Seize Innocent Family’s Life Savings Using Civil Forfeiture Laws

[KamaAina]

http://ij.org/press-release/san-diego-cops-seize-innocent-familys-life-savings-using-civil-forfeiture-laws/

For two years, James Slatic operated his legal medical marijuana business, Med-West Distribution, from a commercial building on Engineer Road. James was public about his marijuana business because, under California law, Med-West was permitted to manufacture and distribute the drug to patients with a doctor’s prescription. The business complied with state law, registered with the City of San Diego, had a website and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in state and federal taxes every year.

Without warning, everything changed in January 2016, when San Diego police and agents from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency raided Med-West and shut the business down. The officers refused to recognize Med-West’s legal status and—without charging anyone with a crime—they seized everything from the business, including $324,000 in business proceeds.

A few days after the raid, the San Diego County District Attorney used civil forfeiture to seize every penny in James’ personal bank accounts, his wife Annette’s accounts, and accounts belonging to their teenage daughters, Lily and Penny. In the nine months since, the District Attorney has held the Slatics’ money in legal limbo, giving them no opportunity to prove their innocence....

Civil forfeiture is the government’s power to take property without proving the owner committed a crime. The practice is controversial because it does not require a criminal conviction and because police and prosecutors get to keep virtually everything they seize for their own use. This encourages police to look for opportunities to seize property even where no crime has occurred.

[Raster]

1. This demonstrates ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS that some law enforcement agencies...

...especially local Sheriff and Police Departments don't want marijuana legalization...THEY MAKE TOO MUCH MONEY off of civil forfeiture.

[JayhawkSD]

2. Marijuana as a business is dicy.

I don't know any of the details of the business or the raid, but San Diego is not a good place to be dealing in marijuana. San Diego County resisted permitting the use of medical marijuana and passed restrictions so onerous as to make it unfeasible until courts ordered them to comply with state law, but this heavily Republican county still resists the presence of what it considers pernicious and corrupting drugs. It is decidedly ridiculous, but...

"Med-West was permitted to manufacture and distribute the drug to patients with a doctor’s prescription." Odd statement. Marijuana is not manufactured, it is grown, and California permits such growth only by patients who are doing so for their own use, only indoors, and only with a limit of 24 plants. That makes the sale of medical marijuana a dicy proposition. What board or agency "permitted" the growth and sale of the product when the state law on the use of medical marijuana is worded to preclude it.

Most counties actually do permit the sale of medical marijuana, since growing your own is an unwieldy process, but you need to be in a county which is not hostile to the presence of the substance. San Diego County is most decidedly not such a place.

The "registered with the City of San Diego" probably only means that they had a business license, which would not speak to the legality of the business in which they were engaged.

It is, in any case, still against federal law, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency is a federal agency enforcing federal laws. I personally don't agree with the policy and think it's stupid, but the Attorney General made his position clear when the law first passed.

The civil forfeiture is actually an appallingly bad federal statute which local governments get to use to their own benefit.

[petronius]

3. Civil forfeiture needs to be drastically reined-in or abolished

IMO, there should be no seizure without a conviction, and no incentive for law enforcement to look for opportunities (no profit motive).

Maybe we need a law saying that all assets seized from criminal enterprises must be specifically allocated to non-LE areas--support services for ex-offenders, homeless shelters, environmental protection, public transit, parks, whatever...