Police Cannot Seize Property Indefinitely After an Arrest, Federal Court Rules

This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it’s up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.

A hard time cap is essential because one’s life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn’t have a time cap.

This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They’re very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.

I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3 months.

Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice.

Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused.

Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back.

Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I’d be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.

They took my camera and then when I tried to get it back they claimed that nothing like that was in evidence. So I filed a police report because the police stole my camera, but I never heard back about it.

Glad you eventually got your money.

Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being tried, and without the protections of the criminal system).

On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?

Canines need to be well trained, if it goes to court the need to prove the dogs won’t point if there are no drugs (or whatever the dog looks for) so if there isn’t good reason to suspect you they won’t bother (depending on how far away a dog is) they are just threatening as if you are guilty you may give up.

There are also rules about how long they can detain you while waiting. See a lawyer (the rules may not be good but you can get off in court if they are ‘too long’)

Drug dogs only provide probable cause for drug searches. They arent suppoaed to extend to other crimes. Just as if the dog alerts on private property and a warrant is then needed, it only provides probable cause for a drug search (or related offense).

On another note, in many states the dogs can’t be trained on marijuana as it has legal purposes (medicinal or recreational). If coming from a state where it is legal, it still shouldn’t provide probable cause as the sniffable residue could be from previous legal use.

So in my view, the drug dog liability is low (biggest threat being planted evidence, but that could happen anyways), and being reined in further. Yes, the made-up probable cause is more likely. That’s why I was wondering.

That’s the thing – it’s not considered a search. That’s how they get away with it. The sniffing has to happen in public (or with a warrant) and is considered in plain smell (same as an officer smelling alcohol on your breath in a car). Then the dog provides probable cause for the real search.

Well, really everything has become heavily criminalized in the 20th century. Especially as things that aren’t outright outlawed are regulated to the extreme. Drugs, alcohol, guns, knives, etc. Some things have gotten more open, but virtually everything has gotten more complicated and easy to get tripped up on technicalities.

  > If you don’t consent to searches, cops that want to search you will either simply search you illegally anyway

Over a decade ago (in California) I had met up with some friends at a park where we were going to carpool to a concert in LA. I had a medical license and my weed was locked in my trunk AND we hadn’t smoked. Cops pulled up, asked what we were doing, we explained, they asked if they could search, we said no, they did anyways. One friend had his hands in his pockets when the cops rolled up and they asked him what he had in there, so he naturally pulled them out and the cops threw him against a car and searched, saying they thought he was pulling a knife on him… I got a ticket, had to show up to court. Contested which meant another court date (I was following the law. Cop didn’t even show up!). I talked with one of the clerks because I had a calc midterm that day and he pushed me to a afternoon session. Showing up to that the judge grilled me about “being late” (I had docs) and I yelled at him for wasting my time, the publics time, money, and how I was scheduled for this time because I had a fucking calculus test so to stop treating me like a degenerate. That I followed the letter of the law. 15 minutes total and charges dismissed. What a shit show…

Another time I was visiting the Golden gate Park. I asked a ranger for directions. He said we smelled like weed. I told him SF smelled like weed. He asked to search, we walked, he grabbed us and my backpack. His evidence to give us a ticket was my still sealed bottle from the dispensary.

I won’t say all cops are bad, but some just want to abuse their power. I won’t say cops are good, because the ones that don’t abuse do know the ones that do. And you know what they say about “good men” who do nothing…

And people still wonder why I’m critical of authority

Why such needless arrogance from cops in a developed country like US? They for sure couldn’t be following some written law, right?

I mean that’s not even pretending to ‘protect and serve’, unless we change subject from ‘citizens’ to ‘ourselves’. I would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of Africa, not champion of free world.

There’s a lot of sordid history around the police being used to keep certain ethnic groups in line (heavily but not just black people – one of the more interesting shifts was how Irish immigrants went from being over-policed to comprising large fractions of many forces), but then the war on drugs really hardened things into a relationship more like an occupying military force. That coincided with many cops joining white flight to the suburbs, meaning that they didn’t feel part of the cities where they served as had been the case a generation earlier, and the lurid tales of how violent & well-armed drug gangs were along with how dangerous “super predators” were lead to a lot of quasi-military weaponry and tactics becoming routine with quaint things like warrants being severely undermined. I say quasi-military because I’ve known multiple combat vets to express disbelief at the poor discipline shown by cops compared to the rules they had in places like Fallujah.

The other big driver was the concept of qualified immunity and civil forfeiture. The modern form of the latter was invented during the drug war and formally embraced by the Reagan administration as a way to make elevated police presence self-funding, and that opened up a lot of room for abuse since it created huge conflicts of interest and the growth of qualified immunity removed the potential counterbalance of personal accountability.

  > you are not paying attention.

Or it just isn’t being discussed. I’d expect to hear fewer of these stories in Russia because they don’t have a free press and you can be punished for what you say online.

I’m sure this is what you mean, but not everyone is going to understand what that phrase means.

Protect and serve hasn’t been a thing for a long time. Police have been trained that no one or anything is worth dying for.

That’s why cops go and hide during mass shootings at schools.

IANAL, but I don’t think they are supposed to. They decide the case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but that’s not authoritative.

We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.

> We will have to wait

I seem to remember something about “justice delayed”.

Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.

More like “this is how you creep in justice”. You set a date and politicians will spend months determining what’s too long/too short. Or in this case, the judges may not get a unanimous ruling as easily. The article mentions that this is a DC appeals court that establishes this, and several other circuits have rules otherwise.

The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court case to set precedent on what is “too long” and use that as a reference for future court cases. Or in this case, it may in fact go to the supreme court who will be able to determine a more concrete time (or just throw it all away and doom us all).

> The fastest way is leaving it vague, waiting for some court case to set precedent on what is “too long” and use that as a reference for future court cases.

We’re stuck with the courts because congress doesn’t do their job, but leaving this to the courts to decide on a case by case basis could mean that only people who can afford to pay the lawyers and court fees and take the time off for a lengthy court battle against the police can expect to have their rights respected. Ideally, we’d have claws with specific limits that would then be used to set department policy. That way it’d be clear to everyone what the expectation is and when a violation occurred.

Given the prior majority of appeals courts deciding the other way, it seems like something of a waste of time to figure out a time period.

Better to say “you can’t hold it for an unreasonable period, and 14 months was unreasonable”

It will have to be resolved at the Supreme Court level anyway, given the US Court of Appeals split.

Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point.

My personal “fun idea” is that laws should have two parts, an “intent” part and an “implementation” part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.

Laws already attempt to encode intent through technical word choices, scoped definitions, and careful construction. Judges and lawyers attempt to discern the intent by careful reading and logical deconstruction.

When the lawmakers and judicial interpreters are good at their jobs this works great. Good lawmakers draft good laws that are clear in their intent. Good courts make good decisions by applying reasonable interpretations of the law.

Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.

How does encapsulating the “intent” into its own section of the law fix the problem? Bad lawmakers will still write vague intent sections as well as poorly defined implementations. Bad lawyers will abuse the vague intent sections to argue for exceptions and novel interpretations of the implementation section. Bad judges will let this fly and warp the system further through bad precedent.

You kinda do get a separate intent section. It begins with a string of “whereas”.

As with code, adding more words rarely makes it clearer. In fact it usually introduces more discrepancies.

“Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.”

Good lawyers and good judges allow bad laws to be taken advantage of. If the law says it, it should be allowed (for leniency to the accused) or the law should be invalidated due to a lack of strict construction.

It is much more difficult to establish standards of intent interpretation than it is to establish standards of statutory interpretation. One could imagine a law written as follows:

In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins, the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments. The minimum temperature shall not be greater than -18C.

There are some gaps that a court needs to fill in order to apply this statute:

– The health department and the area of effect are not specified but these can be assumed to be the health department and area connected to whatever legislature passed the statute. If there is no health department that is the obvious one — if, for example, it was passed by a city legislature and the city has no health department — this could introduce some difficulty.

– The use of “minimum” and “shall not be greater” together in this statute are confused and confusing but since it pertains to freezers, the court can infer that freezers must be set to temperatures of -18C or below (-19C, &c).

However, sorting out the true intent presents insoluble problems that would lead to inconsistent interpretation of the law. Perhaps an establishment only has frozen fish. Does this law apply to them? Generally, the rule is that clear intent clauses — “In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins…” — are ignored in statutory interpretation. The operative part of the statute is that “…the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments.” and that the temperature established by the health department must be -18C or below.

No standard ways of interpretation will make up for a poorly-written statute – and, with all due respect, that’s what your hypothetical example is. In liberal democracies, we expect our representatives to pass only laws that have low ambiguity, and sometimes require third-party review to ensure this.

Why would any legislature pass a law delegating responsibility to a non-existent agency? How could this legislature pass a law with clearly contradictory stipulations regarding temperature? Then, finally, for what reason would intent clauses be written if they were then be entirely ignored?

In conclusion, I think that your hypothetical system of government has greater problems than any inherent difficulty in expressing legal intent that may exist.

> a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement

It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don’t strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an “invalid state” that has no place in the rulebook.

> if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.

This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, … years after the law was passed or updated.

> laws should have two parts, an “intent” part and an “implementation”

That’s a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those.

Anyway, IMO there’s fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don’t have intent. Even if it’s objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.

Normally during the legislative process a record is kept about deliberations leading up to the proposals for texts, and amendments etc..

In a ‘normal’ European democracy judges and lawyers use these deliberations to argue what the intent of the legislative branch was, when it created the law. And to interpret it in that light.

I’d be surprised if there was no equivalent in the USA.
I suppose therein lies the root of the Scalia doctrine though, which is too strictly ‘originalist’ for my taste. But in this instance I’d wager the rules of seizure were given a lot of legislative attention, similar as Habeas Corpus, because illegal seizure is an obvious tool of tyrants. It was often used by Roman Emperors and medieval Kings.

this intent/implementation duality was codified by the chevron precedent that was just overturned by the supreme court.

the legislature was responsible for establishing intent, and the executive was responsible for implementation, and the judiciary branch was responsible for resolving disputes.

but the supreme court ruled that the legislative intent has been too vague, and the executive has been too whimsical with implementation. so the legislature must be more specific, or leave it to the judiciary to establish details.

The intent / implementation duality isn’t related to Chevron or Loper Bright. That is entirely about how to interpret the implementation: to what degree, when considering alternate interpretations, do we weight the agency’s own interpretation?

The intent / implementation discussion comes up when considering statutes like this:

In order to maintain our beautiful forests and meadows, the city of Little Island hereby declares these acts governing the pollution of water: …<enumeration of acts>…

Now many years pass and all the forests are cut down and the meadows are gravel lots, buildings, &c. Is the statute no longer operative? Generally, the way laws are interpreted, the courts would say it is still operative. The alternative would make the interpretation of law quite inconsistent, because it means we are asking courts to judge many things that are not really matters of law.

>Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point.

Seems to me that a vague law is simply an invalid law. The rule of law requires the clear knowledge of what exactly is illegal, if that isn’t clear then its simply a prospective law that doesn’t meet the basic requires to be law.

One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation, as you mention; but judges don’t write legislation. There is a way the rules develop as “common law” — via judicial decisions — but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up through several cases that cover different situations. For example:

– There would be cases where a person’s medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days.

– There would be cases where a person’s groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don’t have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks.

– And so on.

It generally isn’t up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren’t tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.

> they don’t really work the same way

Why not? It would seem that you’re just used to a state of exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice. Sometimes it helps to see things from an outsider’s perspective.

I’m not commenting on the way things should be, I’m commenting on the way things are.

And if you’re saying that this ruling is bad because it doesn’t work well in an idealized model of the law as you think it should be… that’s an interesting observation, but you can hardly fault the judge for crafting a ruling that works in the context of the actual legal system.

The definitions are well defined in theory. How they get applied to specific cases and how they have been perverted over time is the real problem.

Take warrants and probable cause. It’s supposed to be that by a preponderance of the evidence that the crime has been committed. The quality of many warrants today seem to completely miss this to the point that many of the descriptions fail to even claim that the elements of the offense have been satisfied. Then we have such a lazy system that warrants foe summary offenses don’t even have to be for the correct crime – all that needs to be claimed is that any crime has been committed. That’s how it goes when the system is too lazy to give each issue the correct level of attention to protect your basic rights.

Presumably much better than a language which would free all memory after 46 minutes in all cases regardless if that makes sense in the given context.

Also not sure why people like coming with analogies so much, they very rarely are useful or make anything clearer.

I dunno, I think it’s generally quite useful to identify relations between similar concepts. Not always easy to find one that fits perfectly but usually it just needs a bit of a tweak.

Like in this case, the situation you describe is exactly what a garbage collected language does, the key is that they let you mark what memory is still in use with a reference. Similarly in this case, there should be an explicitly defined time with a rule that if police want to hold something longer, they need to actively justify why and what the expected timeline is for the return without the owner needing to take them to court over it. Not perfect, but neither is garbage collection, and to me sounds much improved from what we’ve got.

This claim is false for a lot of modern language runtimes which use tracing garbage collection, like the CLR (C#/VB), JVM (Java/Kotlin/Scala/etc), Go, BEAM (Erlang/Elixer), etc.

There are no hard promises about when or even whether GC will reclaim a particular piece of garbage, precisely to enable optimizations and necessary compromises. Application availability is often more important than immediately collecting every possible piece of garbage. The use of tagging, generations, arenas, etc. all allow the GC to use heuristics and apply different collection regimes to different pieces of garbage.

I’m not sure of your definition of objective here. If you mean a specific implementation and exact version of a specific language does one objective thing that might be true.

But, different implementations of the same language and different versions of those implementations can all do different things. GC rarely says exactly when something will be collected. Only that it will eventually.

Example: https://jsfiddle.net/8cej4tpk/2/

Firefox GCs after about 8 seconds, Safari GCs immmediately, Chrome never (probably not until there’s pressure). And, you’ll find different behavior if you go check different versions of those browsers.

Earlier you wrote “Let’s invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be “reasonable”, without getting into specifics.”

This is essentially what Python-the-language does. It does not require reference counting, or mark-sweep, or any garbage collection at all. The language specification says at https://docs.python.org/3/reference/datamodel.html#objects-v… :

“Objects are never explicitly destroyed; however, when they become unreachable they may be garbage-collected. An implementation is allowed to postpone garbage collection or omit it altogether — it is a matter of implementation quality how garbage collection is implemented, as long as no objects are collected that are still reachable.”

That subjective language specification is quite different than its objective implementation in a Python implementation, which appear to be what you refer to now.

I know you think you’re being facetious, but you’ve just described how modern operating systems work.

They give programs a reasonable amount of memory, without getting into specifics about the limits. And they reclaim memory as necessary based on the demands of the OS and other programs. See, for example, browser memory usage vs video game usage.

It turns out that in practice “reasonable” works quite well as long as you are reasonable about it.

It would not be up to the police to define but a court.

And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.

Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.

That’s all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual.

Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.

> If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling

How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That’s why a reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.

I wouldn’t call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on when property can be held:

> If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the plaintiffs’ effects dissipated, and if no new justification for retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged the MPD to return the plaintiffs’ effects.

…and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay:

> we do not suggest that it must always return the property instantaneously.
Matching a person with his effects can be difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory.

The court’s opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov’t has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that’s fine, but they can’t continue holding it just because they feel like it.

Edge cases can be addressed by allowing for law enforcement to appeal to a judge for an extension. The burden of proof should be on the the party that has taken your stuff, not on the person who’s stuff has been taken.

>vagueness is a feature not a bug.

A feature for who? Where’s the evedence that law enforcement being able to keep your stuff indefinitely benefits the public? The default must be that your stuff belongs to you, unless the police can convince a judge that in this specific case there’s a good reason not to do so.

The vagueness is a feature for law enforcement but a bug for the individual. Real life doesn’t not have time caps. How many days can a person go without food, without a livelihood, without his property that supports his existence? There are time caps for each of these things.

Imagine if prison sentences didn’t define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep extending the duration beyond a defined limit.

How about 300 years? anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling.

Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing and as a layman that feels like a feature not a bug.

> Likely someone with lawyers could get that lowered to nothing

I wouldn’t be so sure. Cops have implicit prosecutorial attorneys too that have a lot more experience with such cases than do defense attorneys.

There is no substitute for clarity in law. All else opens the door to exploitation and selective application, both of which are a mockery of justice.

> anyone with half a brain can see the problem with that ruling.

If the definition of the word “reasonable” was left in the other half then sure.

It’s the job that of the court to define what is “reasonable” on a case by case basis and establish a precedent. They can’t start coming up with laws themselves that clearly establish universal and specific limits.

It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires another court to decide what “reasonable” means in each case, with the time and cost associated with boing to court.

A good ruling would be “by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified”. If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want – like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).

> but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it’s up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.

Not always correct as a principle.

To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is ‘reasonable’ (and yes that can vary for sure) it’s ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as ‘unreasonable’ and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more.

For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it’s implied ‘reasonable’). Imagine if the sign said ‘you can take no more than 5 forks’ my guess is many people would then think ‘it’s ok I don’t need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case’.

Anyway to the point how much would people think is ‘reasonable’?

10 years – no way
5 years – no way
(unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial)
1 year – probably not
1 month – might be to short

… and so on.

I’m not saying so much a time shouldn’t be applied but that it’s not always apparent and also people tend to push to the ‘last minute’ with timing and so on.

https://reason.com/volokh/2024/05/09/supreme-court-issues-fl…

Reason has a good analysis. This recent case was about preliminary hearings in civil asset forfeiture cases in which it was ruled 6-3 that preliminary hearings weren’t required in such cases, but if you read into Gorsuch’s concurring opinion, it looks a lot like he believes civil asset forfeiture is over applied and shouldn’t be used outside of exigent circumstances like those covered under admiralty, customs and revenue law where a ship might leave American jurisdiction before a proper hearing could be held on the asset.

So… with the right case brought before them, the current SCOTUS bench might be ready to gut civil asset forfeiture like a trout.

The conservatives tend to be literalists when interpreting statutes and regulations. There are judicial philosophy reasons for that, but also, statutes and regulations can be changed in response to court rulings. That said, the conservatives tend to be literalists from the perspective of the legislature or regulator at the time the law was enacted, though all the justices (conservative and liberal) recognize that it’s a fiction to say Congress has a single point of view.

When it comes to interpreting the constitution, conservatives likewise tend to be focused on the point of view at enactment. But it’s even more of a fiction to say that the states had a single point of view, and in any case, the text of the constitution often isn’t precise in the way contemporary statutes are. So the conservatives are guided more strongly by the historical evidence about what the sovereign states would have “understood” themselves to be giving up, in replacing the Articles of Confederation with a central federal government.

Given that, they interpret the Fourth Amendment by reference to the historical evidence of what phenomena it was responding to. And as a historical matter, the aim of the amendment was to require warrants, not to narrow the scope of what could be searched or seized. So where there’s probable cause that a crime has been committed, a warrant may issue, and it can be directed at the property that “committed” the crime, since that was a known practice in English law at the time.

> That said, the conservatives tend to be literalists from the perspective of the legislature or regulator at the time the law was enacted

I find it ironic that they view the Constitution as “at the time the law was enacted” and continue to rule on literalism that way, even though those same people explicitly specified that laws and the Constitution should be reviewed, revised, and otherwise be interpreted as appropriate for that time, not the time of writing.

There’s never really an explanation as to why “we have to treat these things like infallible perfect works” when they’re not, and even their authors told us they’re not.

> “we have to treat these things like infallible perfect works”

They don’t treat the law as perfect, they just believe they don’t have the leeway to reinterpret the law as they want in contradiction of the text. The law doesn’t work if justices can read between the lines to get what they want.

Without arguing for or against firearms control, would you argue that the definition of a “well-regulated militia” has changed in the last 240 years?

SCOTUS certainly hasn’t interpreted it “as written”, but has been happy to “evolve” it.

> There’s never really an explanation as to why “we have to treat these things like infallible perfect works” when they’re not, and even their authors told us they’re not.

They are not, though. The constitution can be changed and has been changed many times in the past. I assume they think (or justify their decisions by saying that at least) that it’s not their job to pass legislation or enact constitutional amendments without any input from the states/congress which seems like a reasonable viewpoint.

I spent hundreds of hours hanging out in forfeiture court, it’s wild. The court I was in eventually got a new judge and she took the two DAs aside and said to them “This bullshit you have going here, the 90% of cases you win because people don’t even know how to fill out the paperwork. That ends today. That will not fly in my courtroom.”

I remember that same day a dad came in. The State had his new $60K SUV they were trying to sell. His son had swiped the keys, taken it, got caught drunk-driving. The DAs were like “well, tough shit, it’s the law” and that judge said “Did this man know his son took the car? Does he have valid insurance? Give this man his damned car back. And I want you to pay all his towing and storage fees too.” “His towing fee too?” “Yes” “We don’t even know how to refund that, the city has that money.” “Well, you have an hour to find out. See you in an hour.” LOL

If you are ever caught up in a civil forfeiture, make sure to stay on top of the paperwork. Most people lose their stuff by not doing the very simple paperwork. If you get to the first court hearing the State often gives up if it’s not much value.

The most famous example of this kind of use of eminent domain was the Kelo case which went to the Supreme Court. By 5-4 the court rules it was permissible to use eminent domain to get the land to build a campus for Pfizer. (The majority was Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer.)

As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

After all of this, the land didn’t get built into a corporate campus:

>…For nearly 20 years since the ruling, the entire Fort Trumbull neighborhood remained a vacant lot after being bulldozed by the city; a neighborhood once teeming with families who resided there for generations was home only to weeds and feral cats. The economic development the city promised the U.S. Supreme Court would materialize—if only the government could get its hands on the land—never materialized, even after spending more than $80 million in taxpayer money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelo_v._City_of_New_London
https://ij.org/case/kelo/

> I don’t see anything mechanistically unique about property seizure that would make this tricky to solve.

One of the mechanics at play is suing the property itself, which can’t defend itself for rather obvious reasons. That side steps any property rights
with jurisdiction in rem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._%24124,700_…

IANAL but it’s as stupid as it sounds and it’s been controversial (i.e. United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins)

With an issue like this? Roll the dice, honestly.

I lose track of whether the conservative members of the court are pro-constitution, pro-defendant or pro-police in criminal justice issues like this.

Over the last decade (realizing the court has changed a lot) they’ve made some pretty decent pro-rights decisions in criminal cases where people thought they would be pro-police.

Their recent decisions are garbage fires, though.

The simplest way to figure out the current court is to apply a “Republican Party” filter before any judgment is applied. Texas arguing against adhering to treaties? Texas wins. New York trying to give air passengers the right to not sit in a hot-boxed airplane for eight hours? Sorry blue-staters.

The court tends to attempt to narrow the scope of these party-first decisions, but it’s clear that they’re playing for party above country or sanity.

After that, the court is a mush-mash of deeply thoughtless polarized opinions, resulting in the senseless goat rodeo we presently have, but it’s much easier to figure out who will tilt which way after you apply the party filter.

Who do you think is just “tough on crime”?

Ideologically, Justice Thomas obviously is the most opposed to asset forfeiture. Sotomayor, Kagan, Jackson, and Gorsuch are all opposed to it too. I suppose that leaves Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett, and Jackson as the tough on crime crowd?

Idk where you come from, but defining is hard. It’s really hard to define a table or a chair. You can come up with some definition, but probably someone has a table or a chair that doesn’t fit it.

Defining what’s reasonable is much harder, but it can be parceled out through individual cases, and slowly build jurisprudence.

Defining is not hard. You can say “a table is a flat board with four support structures roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in height, built for the purpose of keeping things off the ground”. Anything that fits that description is a table, and anything that doesn’t, isn’t. Supposed tables with three legs, or Japanese tables, aren’t tables by this definition; they are something else. Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn’t.

I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn’t completely encompass a situation is better than a loose guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the guideline will always leave room for bickering about interpretation.

> a table is a flat board with four support structures roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in height, built for the purpose of keeping things off the ground

That is a terrible definition of a table. This is how you get loop holes in laws.

Law is not computer code. There is a reason we have judges and a court system to interpret laws.

The particular definition isn’t as important as long as it doesn’t leave room for ambiguity. It could be “a table is anything made of wood” and it wouldn’t matter.

>Law is not computer code. There is a reason we have judges and a court system to interpret laws.

I’m of the opinion that the judicial system should be as dumb as possible. It’s the legislative system where the real work should happen.

>Do we really want to spend our time in the legal system litigating what a table is?

Well, the point of it being defined is that you don’t have to.

>What if I use a chair as a place to set my dinner plate while eating on the sofa?

Did you forget the other half of the argument? Why should there be a problem if you want to eat on your chair?

>Otherwise, I can add a fifth center support to my table and now you have to rewrite every law pertaining to tables.

Why would the definition of what a table is need to be modified if someone transforms a table into not-a-table?

Because presumably the laws about the sale, use and disposal of tables-of-mass-consumption where written for a reason, and dodging them by adding or removing a leg would result in criminals getting away with terrible table crimes because of the technicality. Let alone what the police will do to poor students sitting in their “tables” (you know, the ones with four legs and a small horizontal working surface).

Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and thereby subject to additional tariffs.

>dodging them by adding or removing a leg would result in criminals getting away with terrible table crimes because of the technicality

If it’s a crime to do X on a “table” and you do X on a not-table, by definition you’re not committing a crime. Saying that you’re getting away with a crime in such a situation is like saying that you’re getting away with a crime by driving your car within the speed limit, whereas if you were an honest criminal and drove a little bit faster the police would be allowed to ticket you. If there are clearly demarcated limits that people are allowed to stay within, it’s not a technicality whether you’re on one side or the other.

>Let alone what the police will do to poor students sitting in their “tables” (you know, the ones with four legs and a small horizontal working surface).

Sorry, I don’t understand the argument.

>Silly definitions enshrined into law are why cameras arbitrarily limit the length of the videos they will record, lest they be accused of being video equipment and thereby subject to additional tariffs.

What the alternative, given that the government wants to tax “professional video equipment” but not “consumer video equipment” and there’s a gradient from one to the other?

This would immediately be useless IRL in cases and is why we try to establish precedence-based definitions of reasonableness. Simple but incomplete definitions work pretty easily in many engineering contexts, especially because you can easily scope the realm that you apply the definition to, but would immediately fall flat in something as large and complex as the legal context.

Honestly the more I study social/political systems, the more obvious it becomes just how much more difficult the problems in that space are than the engineering ones I’m used to…

> if you can’t define proper limits then you don’t know what you want or how to get it

What if what you want is simply for the onus to be on the cops to defend why they need to do something, instead of it just being assumed they can do whatever they want?

I thought this was an obviously ridiculous statement, and then I looked it up. In many of the last 25 years, civil asset forfeiture outpaces criminal burglary in total losses.

Wow. I thought civil asset forfeiture was a messed up problem before…

While this is nice, it seems to only be addressing “I was arrested and the police seized my stuff”.

E.g it does nothing to stop “the police stopped me, stole my stuff, and then sent me on my way”. E.g the case where there is not even the accusation of a crime has even less restrictions than when you are accused of a crime.

Certainly my anecdata from spending time with a lot of detainees in Chicago is that it was impressively common for the police to find something incriminating on you, and also find some cash, and just take everything and send you on your way.

The last couple of years has made the police a lot more honest due to prevalence of bodycams.

Step 1: seize property

Step 2: hold onto it for an indefinite period of time

Step 3: steal the property

Step 4: when the owner comes for their stuff, claim the property went missing

Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn’t come because the property isn’t worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit with cops for what’s usually small claims

None of this is going to change unless you prevent cops from handling seized property.

> Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn’t come because the property isn’t worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit with cops for what’s usually small claims

Which is why class-action lawsuits are a thing.

We shouldn’t need a court to make this the case…

The police have a role of serving the publics interests. Taking someone’s phone and keeping it for a year is clearly substantially detrimental to that specific member of the public, and rather unlikely to be of commensurate benefit to the rest of the public.

Therefore, such activity isn’t what we pay them for or expect them to do – at a minimum we should be firing any cops who do this deliberately, even if it weren’t illegal.

Can’t sell it, have to hold it, storage isn’t free, so effectively if it isn’t evidence, they can’t keep it.

I wonder if you are owed interest on cash held for an extended period of time.