by Benita M. Dodd, 7/10/15
Susette Kelo was minding her own business when the city of
New London, Conn., set its sights on her home. The city wanted to take the
property and demolish the home, along with her neighbors’ homes, to make way
for private economic development.
Kelo decided to fight back. The Institute for Justice led
her fight, joined by think tanks around the country, including the Georgia
Public Policy Foundation.
Remember the shocked property owners around the nation when
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on June 10, 2005, that the city could take Kelo’s
home and land against her will?
The Court said it was the states’ responsibility to toughen
the laws on eminent domain that enabled governments to abuse the rights of
private property owners.
Today, 10 years after the Court ruling, Kelo’s property
stands vacant. The private development failed spectacularly. Kelo’s battle was
lost but the war was won: Outrage over the ruling led the states to work toward
more protections for property owners and legislation against abuse of eminent domain
by governments. A movie about her battle, “Little Pink House,” begins filming
in September. And Georgia took the High Court at its word: The state
implemented one of the nation’s toughest eminent domain laws in the nation.
Yet government continues abusing its citizens’ property
rights.
“Alex,” too, was minding his own business when his older
sister borrowed his car for a weekend trip with friends out of state. She was
stopped for speeding in North Carolina; police found two marijuana joints and seized
his car.
“You can come get it,” he was told. The high school student,
who’d scrimped and saved the $700 to buy the car, couldn’t afford to take time
off his summer job and pay for the travel and impound charges.
“I rode my bicycle in the heat to and from my job for the
rest of the summer.”
All grown up and an executive in Atlanta now, he still looks
wistfully back on that first car he owned. He never saw it again; it was a long
time before he could afford another.
Alex’s tale of loss is repeated far too often across the
nation and in Georgia. The ability of government to arbitrarily seize the
private property of Americans – without a conviction, let alone filing criminal
charges – is one of the most egregious holes in the American legal system and a
flagrant abuse of private property rights on par with Kelo v. New London.
Innocuously called “civil asset forfeiture,” the process
began with noble intentions. Now it’s a cash cow for too many agencies and the
bane of too many innocent victims unable to fight back against the long arm of
the law. Law authorities stubbornly resist reform, even in Georgia; they get a
cut in the proceeds from what they seize. Only five states prohibit such
seizure: Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina.
The Institute for Justice calls it “policing for profit.” In
a new publication endorsed by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation and more
than a dozen other groups, the Heritage Foundation calls it, “Arresting Your
Property.” Read the publication and a litany of abuses here.
In a legal memorandum for the Heritage Foundation, John G.
Malcolm, a former board member of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation and
senior legal fellow at Heritage, explains: “Civil asset forfeiture is based on
a fiction: that property can be guilty of a crime and thereby forfeited to the
sovereign regardless of whether any individual is ever charged with or
convicted of a crime related to that property.”
How many low-income Americans can’t afford to retrieve
grandma’s furniture seized because a grandson was surreptitiously dealing pot
stashed in his bedroom? How many struggling single parents lose the only
household car because of a child’s drug possession? How many entrepreneurs and
students lose money because an officer decides they have a “suspicious” amount
of money in their possession during a “routine” traffic stop?
The answer, as “Arresting Your Property” recounts, is too
many. The Institute for Justice, “the national law firm for liberty,” has once
again taken the lead, joined by an unusual coalition of national organizations:
Heritage, the American Civil Liberties Union, American Center for Law and
Justice, American Legislative Exchange Council and the Charles Koch Institute,
among others.
The Georgia Public Policy Foundation is among the state
liberty groups championing reforms that protect all innocent citizens,
including those who can’t afford to take on government. Among those reforms:
fairness, transparency, accountability and prohibiting law enforcement agencies
from profiting directly from proceeds. We toughened eminent domain laws. Now,
policymakers need to quit rearranging the deck chairs and scuttle the private
property shipwreck that civil asset forfeiture represents today.
Benita Dodd is vice president of the Georgia Public Policy
Foundation, an independent think tank that proposes market-oriented approaches
to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians. Nothing written here is to
be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of the Georgia Public Policy
Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the
U.S. Congress or the Georgia Legislature.
© Georgia Public
Policy Foundation (July 10, 2015). Permission to reprint in whole or in part is
hereby granted, provided the author and her affiliations are cited.
No comments:
Post a Comment