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Budget cuts can be glorious things: the Department of Justice announces this week that, thanks to cuts in its budget of an initial $746 million in November's Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, followed up by a wondrous addition $458 million rescission in the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016 that became law law last week, it is temporarily halting its so-called "equitable sharing" program.
The "equitable sharing" program should, in the name of justice itself if not the Justice Department, be halted forever, because of its essential nature as organized theft mostly from people who have never actually committed a crime for which any punishment is warranted.
But this budget-driven temporary halt is a start. When the Republic doesn't fall if law enforcement isn't paid off via this particular program for a while for stealing things from citizens for indecent reasons, perhaps a new day of common sense will dawn at the very least for this federal incentive for local misbehavior. Then perhaps civil forfeiture in general could be reconsidered for its injustice if not its budgetary concerns.
Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.
In an editorial published November 22, “Loretta Lynch’s Money Pot,” the Wall Street Journal revealed that during her tenure as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Lynch has used civil asset forfeiture in more than 120 cases, raking in some $113 million for federal and local coffers. The trouble with civil asset forfeiture cases is that they frequently inflict severe losses on people who have only the most tenuous connection with a crime – or even no connection at all.
originally posted by: AlaskanDad
a reply to: FyreByrd
*Do you think that freezing a defendants assets before trial, so the defendant can not afford attorneys is acceptable?
While this destroys the average guy, those that are connected to crime syndicates are far more likely to have representation.
What a mess, how can a system like this serve justice?
*I really doubt you approve of this, just throwing it into the conversation