U.S. seizes $90,000 from man who sold footage of U.S. Capitol riot
Source: Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. authorities have confiscated roughly $90,000 from a Utah man who sold footage of a woman being fatally shot during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, according to court filings.
Prosecutors also have filed additional criminal charges against the man, John Earle Sullivan, a self-described political activist who is accused of entering the Capitol building and participating in the riot, the filings unsealed on Thursday showed.
Sullivan now faces a total of eight criminal counts, including weapons charges, related to the riot. Sullivan's lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Prosecutors have charged more than 440 people in connection with the attack in which Trump supporters stormed the Capitol after he gave a speech to them repeating his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud. The mob smashed windows, fought police and sent lawmakers into hiding. Five people died.
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-seizes-dollar90000-from-man-who-sold-footage-of-us-capitol-riot/ar-AAKfyCq?ocid=DELLDHP&li=BBnb7Kz
soothsayer
(38,601 posts)Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin
(107,922 posts)But asset forfeiture has been abused since Reagan was president and the courts have upheld it for the most part.
Someone who has a better legal background than I do should weigh in.
soothsayer
(38,601 posts)MyOwnPeace
(16,925 posts)and has been brutally utilized in the ever-loosing "War On Drugs."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/12/taken
stillcool
(32,626 posts)that is one hell of an article. Thank you!
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But civil-forfeiture statutes continued to proliferate, and at the state and local level controls have often been lax. Many states, facing fiscal crises, have expanded the reach of their forfeiture statutes, and made it easier for law enforcement to use the revenue however they see fit. In some Texas counties, nearly forty per cent of police budgets comes from forfeiture. (Only one state, North Carolina, bans the practice, requiring a criminal conviction before a persons property can be seized.) Often, its hard for people to fight back. They are too poor; their immigration status is in question; they just cant sustain the logistical burden of taking on unyielding bureaucracies.
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Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities. Theres this myth that theyre cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins, Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgias aggressive use of forfeiture, says. In reality, its small amounts, where people arent entitled to a public defender, and cant afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back. In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.
When you allow the profit incentive, thats when you start getting problems, Porter said. Its like the difference between serving in the Army and working for Blackwater. The Blackwater model wasnt endemic just in Tenaha. In Oklahoma, a Caddo County district attorney hired a private company, Desert Snow L.L.C., to train a local drug-interdiction task force. Although the companys contractors were not certified law officers, they reportedly interrogated drivers and took up to twenty-five per cent of the seized cash, even in cases where no contraband was present. Last month, after a county judge denounced the contractors role as shocking, the district attorney suspended the practice.
During my time in East Texas, a police officer told me that if I ventured beyond Shelby County Id learn that Tenaha was far from an outlier in the region. When I looked through courthouse records and talked with local interdiction officers in nearby counties, I saw what he meant. In Hunt County, Texas, I found officers scoring personal bonuses of up to twenty-six thousand dollars a year, straight from the forfeiture fund. In Titus County, forfeiture pays the assistant district attorneys entire salary. Farther south, in Johnson County, I came upon a sheriffs office that had confiscated an out-of-state drivers cash, in the absence of contraband, in exchange for a handwritten receipt that gave the traveller no information about who had just taken his money, why, or how he might get it back.
bucolic_frolic
(43,128 posts)Sometimes they seize profits from books written by murderers for example.
More_Cowbell
(2,191 posts)The seizure might be related to Sullivan being the one who broke the window that the woman who was shot was trying to get through.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2021/05/20/doj-moves-to-label-john-sullivan-a-professional-provocateur/