Supreme Court curbs power of government to impose heavy
fines and seize property, By Andrew O'Reilly |
Fox News.
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled to
drastically curb the powers that states and cities have to levy fines and seize
property, marking the first time the court has applied the Constitution’s ban
on excessive fines at the state level.
Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg, who returned to the court for the first time in almost two
months after undergoing surgery for lung cancer, wrote the majority opinion in
the case involving an Indiana man who had his Land Rover seized after he was
arrested for selling $385 of heroin.
“Protection
against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American
history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties," Ginsburg
wrote.
“They can be used, e.g., to retaliate against or chill the speech of political
enemies. They can also be employed, not in service of penal purposes, but as a
source of revenue.”
While the
ruling was unanimous, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate opinion
outlining different reasons for reaching the same conclusion -- namely, that
"the right to be free from excessive fines is one of the 'privileges or
immunities of citizens of the United States' protected by the Fourteenth
Amendment." Ginsburg's opinion was based on the due process clause of the
same amendment.
The
Supreme Court, with its ruling, sent the case of Tyson Timbs back to a lower
court to decide if Indiana officials went too far in seizing Timbs’ Land
Rover. Timbs, who bought the Land Rover for $42,000 in January 2013, was
arrested a few months later for selling heroin and pleaded guilty.
Timbs, who
was sentenced to one year of home detention and five years of probation, argues
that the forfeiture of his vehicle was disproportionate to the $10,000 maximum
fine he faced for selling heroin.
The high
court’s ruling could now limit the ability for states and cities to carry
out what critics – on both sides of the political divide – say is an
increasingly common practice of imposing steep fines and seizing property.
Timbs'
legal team, at the Institute for Justice, cast the decision as a blow against
the practice of civil forfeiture, the legal process by which law
enforcement officers are able to take assets from people suspected of
involvement in a crime without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing.
The same
group has focused on similar issues for years. “I can’t think of any other
issue that enjoys such cross-aisle support,” Darpana Sheth, a senior attorney
at the Institute for Justice, told
Fox News in
2017.
The Constitution’s ban on excessive fines, meanwhile, is
enshrined in the Eighth Amendment and, while originally it only applied at the
federal level, the Supreme Court since the 1960s has incorporated many of those
rights at the state level under the 14th Amendment’s due process clause.
Since 2014, more than 20 states and Washington, D.C., have
enacted laws either limiting forfeiture or making the process more transparent.
New Mexico now requires a criminal conviction before any property
is seized, and police in Florida need to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that
property was linked to a crime before it’s seized. Arizona raised the burden on
law enforcement to prove property was used in a crime from a preponderance of
evidence to clear and convincing evidence, while Mississippi passed a law
enacting a slew of provisions aimed at bringing more transparency to the
practice.
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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