13 Comments

I was initially outraged by this (I travel with large sums of cash when I gamble) but further review calms me.

Mike is incorrect about the correct standard of review. While factual findings are subject to deference, “the district court’s determination that the government carried its burden based upon those factual findings, however, is subject to de novo review as a mixed question of law and fact,” citing United States v. $84,615 in U.S. Currency, 379 F.3d 496, 501 (8th Cir. 2004).

Gonzolez’s claim that he was just driving home from Chicago after failing to buy a refrigerated truck is somewhat contradicted by the fact that he lied to police, that he didn’t know the name or address of the person he was supposedly buying a truck from, and that refrigerated Freightliner trucks don’t cost anywhere near $125,000. That the money was also in small bills is suspicious to me, though the government didn’t present evidence on that question. There are no doubt poster children for civil forfeiture abuses, but I’m far from convinced that this is one of them.

As a side note, the swing vote on this case was Judge Morris Arnold, who is perhaps one of the ten most libertarian judges on the federal bench.

While not a direct fix in this case, SCOTUS has had multiple oportunities to remand cases back when the appellate courts ignore the findings of fact at the trial court. SCOTUS had the perfect opportunity to send such and appropriate signal in the Gutter v Michigan case.

Likewise, in order to reach a bad result, the appellate court had to ignore the findings of fact at the trial court.

Why am I not surprised? The main task of most police agencies and courts is not to preserve law and order but to generate income.
$124K is a lot of income for a police force that usually has to rake it in one parking ticket at a time.

New Freightliner trucks can cost that much. Like this one. (from this list)

I stand corrected.

Glen–but the case was about a USED truck. So if Gonzalez’ story is true, he wouldn’t have needed that much cash.

Don’t take this to mean I agree with the decision. When egregious abuses like this occur, the government needs to be worried that they cause law-abiding citizens to feel that it’s better to allow drug dealers to keep cash than to sieze money from citizens _at all_!

I think that the probability of the driver’s factual guilt should be irrelevant at this stage, in terms of how we feel about this news story. If he is a drug seller — and of course drugs should not be illegal, but that is another story — then charge him with drug selling and confiscate the money after a conviction. The “civil” fiction here allows (actually, encourages) punishment without due process, which during the Golden Age of Liberty was unconstitutional in the United States.

Jim is absolutely correct that the real issue here is the low bar to civil forfeiture established by Congress. I was responding to the claim of judicial activism. One can disagree about the merits of an opinion without it being judicial activism.

How long before the police start pulling over motorists and “forfeiting” whatever money they can find in their wallets – or do they that already. Stand and deliver!

Could they just throw the guy out of the country for being an illegal alien? Why else would he not have a bank account?

I think the opinion stems a great deal from attitudes like Jennifer’s (and, admittedly, my first gut reaction) that no legitimate person would be holding onto $40,000 in small bills without a bank account. But it’s really not that unusual in the Mexican immigrant community. I had coffee with blogger Tom Kirkendall a few months back, and he told me of a prominent and successful Houston family of immigrants (one known to just about every Houstonian) who ran into financial and legal troubles precisely because they used the same sort of unrecorded transactions and loans to expand their business.

Ted, if any appellate court can reverse any district/trial court’s factual determinations simply by re-characterizing their disagreements over the facts as legal disputes over whether or not the requiste burden of proof was met in determining them, then what exactly is the “clearly erroneous” standard good for? All factual disagreements can be characterized that way; if you don’t like the trial judge’s conclusion on issue X, just rule de novo that Party A met its burden in proving ~X. In that case the “clearly erroneous” standard is nothing more than a drafting guide.

I’m not a litigator, so perhaps I am missing something here, but it would seem to me that the only question that should have been considered on appeal was whether or not the evidence on the record was so overwhelming in the government’s favor that no rational trier of fact could have found for Gonzalez. And under that standard, the district court’s decision should have been easily affirmed.

While it’s possible to characterize all factual disputes as legal disputes, it’s not possible to rule de novo that a party met its burden if the fact-finder finds the right facts. If this were a jury trial, then the court would have had to construe the verdict in the light most favorable to the victor, and you are correct that that would have resulted in affirmance. But this was an issue where a district court made findings of fact and findings of law, was sloppy with its findings of fact, and left room for the appellate court to maneuver under the standard of a mixed question of fact and law on review.

The district court still has a chance to fix matters if it’s so inclined.