{"id":24575,"date":"2020-03-18T20:57:34","date_gmt":"2020-03-19T00:57:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/?p=24575"},"modified":"2020-03-18T20:57:34","modified_gmt":"2020-03-19T00:57:34","slug":"joe-biden-father-of-the-drug-wars-asset-forfeiture-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2020\/03\/18\/joe-biden-father-of-the-drug-wars-asset-forfeiture-program\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Biden: Father of the Drug War’s Asset Forfeiture Program"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In 1991, Maui police officers showed up at the home of Frances and Joseph Lopes. One officer showed his badge and said, \u201cLet\u2019s go into the house, and we will explain things to you.\u201d Once he was inside, the explanation was simple: \u201cWe\u2019re taking the house.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Lopses were far from wealthy. They worked on a sugar plantation for nearly fifty years, living in camp housing, to save up enough money to buy a modest, middle-class home. But in 1987, their son Thomas was caught with marijuana. He was twenty-eight, and he suffered from mental health issues. He grew the marijuana in the backyard of his parents\u2019 home, but every time they tried to cut it down, Thomas threatened suicide. When he was arrested, he pled guilty, was given probation since it was his first offense, and he was ordered to see a psychologist once a week. Frances and Joseph were elated. Their son got better, he stopped smoking marijuana, and the episode was behind them.<\/p>\n

But when the police showed up and told them that their house was being seized, they learned that the episode was not behind them. That statute of limitations for civil asset forfeiture was five years. It had only been four. Legally, the police could seize any property connected to the marijuana plant from 1987. They had resurrected the Lopes case during a department-wide search through old cases looking for property they could legally confiscate.<\/p>\n

Asset forfeiture laws once applied only to goods that could be considered a danger to society\u2014illegal alcohol, weapons, etc. But with the birth of the modern war on drugs, lawmakers pushed for something with more teeth, which they achieved with the 1970 passage of the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Although many are familiar with the story of the steady expansion of civil asset forfeiture laws, many overlook the fact that presidential candidate Joe Biden helped put these laws on previously apathetic law enforcement agents\u2019 radar and, worse, played a significant role in broadening their application. Biden has effectively aided and abetted the police state\u2019s sustained assault on American subjects\u2019 property rights.<\/p>\n

Expanding Asset Forfeiture, Phase I: The RICO Act of 1970<\/strong><\/h4>\n

In 1970, the targets of asset forfeiture were wealthy crime bosses. It was prosecutor G. Robert Blakey, who had worked under Attorney General Robert Kennedy and various congressmen, who set about broadening its scope. He helped draft a bill for a new legal concept, \u201ccriminal forfeiture,\u201d which would allow police to seize the illegally acquired profits of a convicted criminal.<\/p>\n

The assets that could be seized would now consist of anything that was funded with money connected to criminal activity. To appease those who were worried about abuses of power, Blakey assured them that prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the criminal was guilty of a crime before the assets could be seized. There was nothing to worry about; only legitimate bad guys would suffer.<\/p>\n

The new policy was passed as part of the\u00a0Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act\u00a0<\/a>in 1970. Blakey was a fan of the 1931 movie\u00a0Little Caesar<\/em>, and the acronym was crafted to honor Blakey\u2019s favorite character from the movie, the gangster Rico Bandello.<\/p>\n

The RICO Act wasn\u2019t designed to be part of the war on drugs; it was just meant to target criminals. But when Richard Nixon took office, the RICO Act was one of a number of new tools that the members of his newly created Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (precursor to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)) could use to fight his drug war. Combined with other legal innovations, such as no-knock raids and mandatory minimum sentences, Nixon and his administration would cure America of the drug menace.<\/p>\n

Still, the pesky \u201cconviction\u201d requirement stood in the way of law enforcement\u2019s ability to seize criminal assets. In 1978, Jimmy Carter\u2019s director of the Office of Drug Abuse (the title \u201cdrug czar\u201d is often retroactively applied), Peter Bourne, decided that the law needed to be changed. Bourne learned of an incident at the Miami International Airport in which a suitcase had been left on the baggage carousel for three hours before police picked it up and found $3 million inside. If drug kingpins could afford to abandon so much money, they must be flush with enough cash to hardly worry about criminal forfeiture laws.<\/p>\n

So, at Bourne\u2019s urging, Congress modified the RICO Act to allow the DEA to confiscate assets\u00a0without\u00a0<\/em>a conviction. The burden of proof wasn\u2019t entirely gone (yet), but the government only needed an indictment, rather than a full conviction, to justify asset seizure. After all, the government knew who a lot of these kingpins were, but the criminals continued to get rich while the DEA struggled to build cases against them.<\/p>\n

Even then, though, real estate was off limits. Asset forfeiture had evolved from the seizure of dangerous items into criminal profit following a conviction, and now into criminal profit (and its \u201cderivative proceeds\u201d) without the conviction requirement. But real estate\u2014such as the Lopes house\u2014still couldn\u2019t be touched.<\/p>\n

But through the 1970s, the RICO Act was still largely ignored by prosecutors. Blakey was holding seminars out of Cornell University, which were attended by federal law enforcement agents and prosecutors, urging them to take advantage of the RICO Act in the war on drugs. He made few inroads. The law was unwieldy, and prosecutors were overworked. More often than not, it wasn\u2019t worth their time. While Blakey was proselytizing the virtues of his law to little effect, he was unwittingly gaining an ally in Congress: Senator Joe Biden.<\/p>\n

Expanding Asset Seizure, Phase 2: Biden and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Biden, a young Senator from Delaware, had to do something to show that despite his \u201cliberal\u201d reputation, he could be just as tough on crime as his Republican colleagues. He took notice of the RICO Act, and he realized that law enforcement agencies were not taking advantage of it, particularly in waging the drug war. He turned to the General Accounting Office and asked them to produce a study on the potential uses of RICO for drug enforcement.<\/p>\n

The report showed that the RICO Act granted enormous powers to police to confiscate drug-related assets but that these powers were not being taken advantage of: \u201cThe government has simply not exercised the kind of leadership and management necessary to make asset forfeiture a widely used law enforcement technique,\u201d the report stated. By the time the report came in, Ronald Reagan was settling into office and getting ready to renew the war on drugs.<\/p>\n

Reagan brought the FBI into the drug war, and he gave the director, William Webster, a mission. His agents would use the powers of the RICO Act to find drug rings and take away their assets. Drug cartels must be rendered unprofitable. As the 1980s progressed, the war on drugs would be the country\u2019s biggest political issue. Politicians from both parties would work to show that they could out\u2013drug warrior their opponents. One Democratic representative from Florida, Earl Hutto, said, \u201cIn the war on narcotics, we have met the enemy, and he is the U.S. Code.\u201d<\/p>\n

Biden brought the RICO law to the attention of the federal government, Reagan enlisted the FBI to use it against drug traffickers, and both parties would now work to dismantle any limitations that the law might still impose.<\/p>\n

The drug war became a contest of political one-upmanship. Reagan\u2019s Justice Department fought for all kinds of new powers. Attorney General Edwin Meese and Assistant Attorney General William Weld (yes,\u00a0that\u00a0<\/em>Bill Weld) railed against the limitations on their legal prerogative. Weld went so far as to argue in favor of the legality of using the Air Force to shoot\u00a0suspected\u00a0<\/em>drug-smuggling planes out of the sky, a policy that even his boss was unwilling to endorse.<\/p>\n

But Meese, Weld, and everyone else seemed to agree that forfeiture laws didn\u2019t go nearly far enough. By requiring an indictment, the government still had to meet some standard of reasonable guilt before seizing property, which allowed far too many criminals that law enforcement\u00a0knew\u00a0<\/em>to be guilty (but couldn\u2019t build a case against) to keep their ill-gotten gains. To take things further, the Justice Department argued that law enforcement should be allowed to take \u201csubstitute\u201d property: they knew that they wouldn\u2019t be able to take everything that had been paid for with drug money, so it stood to reason that they should be able to take legally acquired assets of equal value (however that might be determined). And finally, with real estate off limits, the government was unable to seize marijuana farms, drug warehouses, and criminal homes.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Comprehensive Forfeiture Act\u00a0<\/a>fixed all of these problems. Biden introduced the new bill in 1983, and its provisions became law the next year. Under this law federal agents had nearly unlimited powers to seize assets from private citizens. Now the government only needed to find a way to let local and state police join the party.<\/p>\n

Biden\u2019s bill was passed as part of the\u00a01984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act\u00a0<\/a>. In addition to a slew of new powers for prosecutors, the burden of proof for asset seizure was lowered once again (agents had to onlybelieve<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>that what they were seizing was equal in value to money\u00a0believed\u00a0<\/em>to have been purchased from drug sales). More significantly, the bill started the \u201cequitable sharing\u201d program that allowed local and state law enforcement to retain up to 80 percent of the spoils.<\/p>\n

The law took effect in 1986, the year before Thomas Lopes pled guilty to charges of growing a marijuana plant in his parents\u2019 backyard. In 1987, when Thomas faced the judge, the government had just made it so that his local police had an enormous incentive and unchecked authority to seize property from private citizens, so long as they could show any flimsy connection to drugs. By 1991, the Maui police were running out of easily seized property, so they started combing through case files within the five-year limit to find new sources of enrichment for their precinct using the expanded RICO powers. One such file brought the Lopes home to their attention.<\/p>\n

But the Lopeses are only one example out of millions. In the year their home was confiscated by police for a minor, four-year-old drug charge, $644 million in assets were seized. In 2018 alone,\u00a0the Treasury Department\u2019s Forfeiture Fund saw nearly $1.4 billion in deposits\u00a0<\/a>. The Lopes story merely illustrates that criminals (regardless of how one might feel about drug laws) are hardly the only people falling victim to this policy.<\/p>\n

The decades-long abuse of this policy has reached such extreme proportions that people on all sides of the political aisle have been turning against it. At this writing (February 20, 2019 for the original version of this article),\u00a0the Supreme Court has unanimously voted in favor of Tyson Timbs\u00a0<\/a>, whose $42,000 Land Rover was seized in 2015 following a conviction for selling $400 in heroin. The court is asserting that asset forfeiture constitutes a fine and that the Eighth Amendment\u2014which protects citizens from excessive fines\u2014applies to both state and local governments. The consequences of the ruling remain to be seen, but it seems nearly certain that the unanimous decision was motivated by the increasing outrage against the civil asset forfeiture policies.<\/p>\n

In the fight against the egregious violation of property rights that is asset forfeiture, Americans must not forget who those who promulgated these laws and birthed a new paradigm of government aggression against private persons that is proving difficult to overturn.<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Baum, Dan. 1996.\u00a0Smoke and Mirrors: The War On Drugs and the Politics of Failure<\/em>. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Author:\n<\/div>\n
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Chris Calton<\/a><\/p>\n

Chris Calton is a 2018 Mises\u00a0Institute Research Fellow and an economic historian. He is writer and host of the\u00a0Historical Controversies<\/em>\u00a0podcast<\/a>.<\/p>\n

See also his YouTube channel\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Source: Joe Biden: Father of the Drug War’s Asset Forfeiture Program | Mises Wire<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1991, Maui police officers showed up at the home of Frances and Joseph Lopes. One officer showed his badge and said, \u201cLet\u2019s go into the house, and we will explain things to you.\u201d Once he was inside, the explanation was simple: \u201cWe\u2019re taking the house.\u201d The Lopses were far from wealthy. They worked on a sugar plantation for nearly fifty years, living in camp housing, to save up enough money to buy a modest, middle-class home. But in 1987, their son Thomas was caught with marijuana. He was twenty-eight, and he suffered from mental health issues. He grew the marijuana in the backyard of his parents\u2019 home, but every time they tried to cut it down, Thomas threatened suicide. When he was arrested, he pled guilty, was given probation since it was his first offense, and he was ordered to see a psychologist once a week. Frances and Joseph were elated. Their son got better, he stopped smoking marijuana, and the episode was behind them. But when the police showed up and told them that their house was being seized, they learned that the episode was not behind them. That statute of limitations for civil asset forfeiture was five […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[3621],"class_list":["post-24575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-and-politics","tag-joe-biden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}