Be Excellent To Each Other

A DRUG dealer has been stripped of an inheritance prosecutors believe he was going to use to commit crime. [He] has lost £2000 under Proceeds Of Crime laws even though he was able to prove it was left to him by his mother. The Dundee supplier gave up a legal battle to keep the money after lawyers for the Crown Office, in a rare civil case, argued he planned to use it for "unlawful activity" and not, as he claimed, to buy a car.

Rudy Ramirez never expected to become a statistic in the War on Drugs when he set off to buy a used car, $7300 in cash at the ready, in January 2000. Ramirez, who lives in Edinburg, Texas near the border with Mexico, had spotted a listing for the used Corvette in a magazine and wanted it badly enough that he talked his brother-in-law into accompanying him on a thousand mile road trip to Missouri to make the purchase. When Ramirez was pulled over by police in Kansas City, however, the tenor of the trip changed.
"They asked if I had any money with me, and I said yes," recalls Ramirez. "I didn't think they would take it away. I had nothing to hide." But the trajectory of the rental car, and the piles of cash, suggested otherwise to police--who suspected him of trafficking drugs from the Mexican border. As Ramirez tells it, he was detained at the side of the road for hours while his car was thoroughly searched and inspected by a drug dog. "They kept asking me, `Where are the drugs?'" he recalls. "I told them they had the wrong guy."

The Drug Enforcement Agency's file on the case indicates that Ramirez gave officers confused statements about both the money and his destination, and that his extremely brief stay in a Missouri motel looked suspicious. What's more, the drug dog "alerted" on parts of the car, indicating that drugs could have been there at one time--which, since it was a rental car, may or may not have anything to do with Rudy Ramirez.

Still, the search turned up no drugs of any kind, and the officers finally told Ramirez that he was free to go--but not before confiscating $6,000 of his money in the name of the federal war on drugs in a process known as "forfeiture." Despite check stubs that he says prove that the money came from a car accident settlement reached several months before, and bank records showing that it was withdrawn from his account just prior to the Missouri trip, Ramirez has, to this day, been unable to get his money returned. He shakes his head as he describes it. "All I want is my money back," he says.

Last year, almost a billion dollars worth of cash, cars, boats, real estate, and other property was forfeited to the federal government--most of it labeled as drug-related. And while much of this property was taken from bona fide criminals, critics of the nation's forfeiture laws say that too many innocent people have fallen through the cracks in a system that, until recently, has been far too heavily slanted in the government's favor.

Why would Curio love that?

This is sadly not new. US police forces have been seizing all sorts of stuff on the grounds that if you're maybe a criminal and you have money the money must be illegal.

I can't find the post now, but he's a fan of the idea that if you're more likely to injure someone (whilst doing something unrelated) you should be punished.

And there's no chance you're misrepresenting his opinion here at all?

What are you, his girlfriend?

There's no need to fight, there's enough Curiosity for both of us.

Don't make me jealous.

And there's enough of me for everyone. *glances mournfully at waistline*

I can't find the post now, but he's a fan of the idea that if you're more likely to injure someone (whilst doing something unrelated) you should be punished.

Also, future crimes have always been punishable. Conspiracy to commit murder, to defraud, etc.

If you know the guys on the way to do 9/11 are gonna do it, you don't wait until the towers are falling to break out the handcuffs.

Also, future crimes have always been punishable. Conspiracy to commit murder, to defraud, etc.

If you know the guys on the way to do 9/11 are gonna do it, you don't wait until the towers are falling to break out the handcuffs.

Also, future crimes have always been punishable. Conspiracy to commit murder, to defraud, etc.