Rough Ol' Boy

San Diego City Beat requested an accounting of how San Diego County’s district attorney Bonnie Dumanis spent her office’s forfeiture funds since 2009. What they got back was a two-page, typo-filled document that apparently took Dumanis’ office four-and-a-half hours to prepare. But more distressing than that lack of basic accounting standards is what the DA has [...]

As part of the ongoing federal crackdown on medical marijuana in California, Melinda Haag, United States attorney for the Northern District of California, has set her sights on well-known dispensary owner and activist Richard Lee. Lee founded Oaksterdam University, which instructs people on how to grow medical marijuana, and helped fund California’s Proposition 19, which would [...]

Libertarian writer Wendy McElroy provides a concise overview of civil asset forfeiture laws in the United States with the recent Motel Caswell seizure in Massachusetts as the key example. Her conclusion is worth quoting extensively: Not only does civil forfeiture create abuses, as [Institute for Justice President Chip] Mellor points out, it itself is an abuse — an abuse [...]

My parents own two flower shops in my hometown, and growing up I worked there after school and every summer. One day when I was 17, I had to deliver an arrangement to a nursing home just west of town. I viscerally disliked nursing home deliveries because the institutions generally smelled horribly, and from the [...]

On Friday, the Senate rejected Sen. Jim Webb’s proposal to create a commission that would examine America’s criminal justice system at all levels and recommend changes that would make law enforcement more equitable and cost-effective. The opposition offered a rather surprising argument: Two Republican senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, spoke [...]

Federal prosecutors continue to employ asset forfeiture as their weapon of choice in their new offensive against medical marijuana in California. California Watch reports: U.S. Attorney Laura E. Duffy, whose district includes Imperial and San Diego counties, said marijuana advertising is the next area she’s “going to be moving onto as part of the enforcement efforts [...]

At every level of government in America, the power of the purse is given to the polity’s legislative body, whether that’s Congress, a state assembly, or a group of county commissioners. However, asset forfeiture funds allow prosecutors to partially usurp that role–a role they are not elected to perform. The latest example of this phenomenon comes from Kleberg [...]

The federal government is once again ramping up its war on medical marijuana in states such as California where it is legal under state law. They have always used asset forfeiture to threaten medical marijuana dispensaries, but the new strategy appears to combine forfeiture with state and federal laws that assign greater penalties to sales [...]

The Institute for Justice (IJ)–a “merry band of libertarian litigators,” as George Will described them–has joined a lawsuit to protect Russell and Patricia Caswell from having their Tewksbury, Massachusetts motel forfeited by the federal government. The Caswells are not charged with any crime, but a minuscule number of their patrons have been arrested over the [...]

I’ve been out of town on vacation since the middle of last week, so I missed this story when it first appeared, but I can’t pass it up in good conscience: The former Romulus police chief, his wife and five Romulus officers were charged today with running a scheme in which drug forfeiture money was [...]