Jeff Sessions Removes Restrictions on Controversial Police Seizures
by JON SCHUPPE
Attorney General Jeff Sessions just made it a lot easier for police to seize cash and property from people suspected ─ but not necessarily charged with or convicted ─ of crimes.
He did it by eliminating an Obama administration directive that prevented local law enforcement from circumventing state restrictions on forfeiture of civil assets. The technique was embraced in the early years of the war on drugs, but it has since been linked to civil rights abuses: people losing cash, cars and homes without any proven link to illegal activity, police taking cash in exchange for not locking suspects up, a legal system that makes it hard for victims to get their possessions back.
Two dozen states have made it harder for authorities to take property from suspects without first securing criminal convictions. Three have outlawed it entirely, according to the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit that advocates for reform.
Local police got around those laws by asking federal agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, to take on forfeiture cases and then share the proceeds. That loophole, called "adoption," helped fuel an explosion in forfeitures, which became a multibillion-dollar government enterprise.
One of Sessions' predecessors, Eric Holder, issued a directive in January 2015 that prohibited the adopted forfeitures, which led to a drop in seizures. Police and prosecutors, who used the money to pay for new cars, equipment and training ─ and to help crime victims ─ hated it. They made it a key complaint to the Trump administration.
They found a sympathetic ear in Sessions, a former federal prosecutor and Republican senator from Alabama, who has called for a return to 1980s- and 1990s-era crime-fighting strategies in defiance of a bipartisan movement to ease up in favor of rehabilitation and treatment. Sessions has already reversed a Holder memo that sought to curb the use of mandatory minimum prison sentences.
more:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/jeff-sessions-removes-restrictions-controversial-police-seizures-n784476
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