"To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing,
if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803

Monday, June 23, 2008

Here’s the situation.  An elderly couple, distrusting of banks, has a safe with $400,000 in it, their life savings.  One day thieves show up to rob them.  The couple’s son ends up getting stabbed, and the father kills one of the attackers.  During the search of the house the open the safe and find a small amount of marijuana in it, which the man says he uses to help deal with the pain of a hip replacement.  The government, with no other evidence, decides to confiscate the money under asset forfeiture laws.  You can read the whole story here.  I got a chuckle when I came to this part.

The Institute for Justice, a vocal critic of civil forfeiture laws, reported recently that seized assets rose nationwide between the fiscal years 2006 and 2007 from $257 million to $366 million.

The law on which forfeiture is based contains a complex formula for how the proceeds are divided among local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.

Jeff Gamso, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, fears the process is ripe for corruption.

“It’s a terrible law,” Gamso says. “The way the law works essentially is, you’ve got to prove the government is wrong. I don’t know how to put this other than to say that that’s fundamentally un-American. The idea is that somehow we’re going to assume you’re guilty because the government says so.”

It’s not “fundamentally un-American” any more, is it?

Update: From a TNR story about China and the Olympic Games.

The government seems to treat critics who have foreign audiences with special venom, as if to remind outsiders how little their disapproval matters. Two of the best-known cases are Hu Jia and Chen Guangcheng. Hu Jia, an AIDS activist and blogger, was sentenced to three and a half years in April 2008 by a Beijing court for--again--inciting subversion of state power because of his writings, including an open letter on “The Real China and the Olympics.” For months before his arrest, Hu had been harassed. At one point he posted on YouTube an ominous yet comic video of buff young plainclothes security agents outside his apartment smoking, lunching, and picking their teeth. When Hu’s wife went on an errand, they crowded and jostled her like bullies in a high school hallway.

This must be especially terrifying when the bullies run the country. I have asked activists why they take such risks. They usually say that they know how to maneuver within the limits allowed by Chinese law. But for many of them this gamble eventually goes wrong, and Hu Jia was such a case. After his arrest, Hu was tortured with stress positions and sleep deprivation.

This isn’t torture.  It’s a completely legitimate form of government coercive interrogation.  Just ask Thrill.  Hey, perhaps we can get some of the Chinese to come and teach our CIA types their techniques, since they’ve been using this honorable and moral method of interrogation for decades and are undoubtedly better at it than we are.