This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.
A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap.
This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.
I once had the cops seize $800 in cash I had on me to pay for motorcycle service (15% discount with cash) and hold it for 3 months.
Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice.
Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused.
Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back.
Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.
They took my camera and then when I tried to get it back they claimed that nothing like that was in evidence. So I filed a police report because the police stole my camera, but I never heard back about it.
Pretty common. This sort of mistrust is one reason people oppose red flag laws that require seizure (before even being tried, and without the protections of the criminal system).
On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
Reading anecdotes about US police is trully terrifying. How one of the richest countries in the world be so incompetent in this one particular regard. Is there some sort of historic review that highlights how it got this way?
Heh USA biggest police state, in EU there is only one state with same level of policing. Germany. Cops there will make you strip search even before concert, because of "drugs" lol.
That is clear abuse. I think there should be very clear law and the same that the police should be extremely diligent applying laws, abuse should be punished the same way. But for this, rules need to be crystal clear.
California and the Federal gov’t has a requirement that if you’re ever accused of domestic violence, you’re not allowed to be near any firearms unless the accusations have been withdrawn or found without basis. (Notably, it is a very low bar for them to be found as having a basis. The standard is literally ‘could have possibly happened/occurred’, not did or beyond a reasonable doubt, etc.)
Practically in California, you’re required to turn them all in for storage or sell them within 24 hrs of being served - either selling them to a dealer or turning them in to the cops or to a very hard to find, expensive, and specialized type of gun dealer who doesn’t advertise.
Keep in mind - accused - not a finding of or anything - and the court is happy to issue these orders ex-parte based off accusations which the impacted party has no chance to rebut or is necessarily even aware of at the time the order is issued. And the bar to issue it is very, very low. The accusations don’t even need to make sense or be supported by any police calls or the like.
In theory? Fine. In practice, a very common abuse and harassment tactic. Or actually necessary.
If you can’t find the specialized type of dealer and get him everything within 24 hrs, and can’t sell everything for penny’s on the dollar to a standard gun dealer in time, then you have to turn them into the cops. Or be committing a felony.
Oh and the court will demand proof when you go to reply to/contest the emergency order that you did everything within the requisite amount of time, and did indeed turn everything in.
In Santa Clara county - among others - apparently the cops will also never actually return the guns to you either. Because ‘it would look bad if you then used them in a crime’. Yes, this is clearly against the law. They DGAF.
There are multiple outstanding lawsuits against them for this, last I checked, but the courts keep putting them on the back burner as after the Judge Persky recall no one wants to be involved in anything like this in the current political climate.
They’d much rather drag it out for years or even decades over procedural matters.
Even if it’s really clear what the legal thing to do is.
One or two guns, not a lot of money. But folks with collections? Better not piss off anyone you’re living with.
Why such needless arrogance from cops in a developed country like US? They for sure couldn't be following some written law, right?
I mean that's not even pretending to 'protect and serve', unless we change subject from 'citizens' to 'ourselves'. I would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of Africa, not champion of free world.
If that happened to me I would put up posters with the face and name of the thief (police officer) that did that in his neighborhood. I would want everyone to know what kind of an asshole he is.
It's not perfect, but forcing police to define the time that something will be taken does go a long way to shining a light into their intentions and make it easier to prove that they're being unreasonable. "Local police department claims right to hold things for 30 years without a warrant" is a much better headline that would draw a lot more scrutiny from local voters and councils than just "the police won't tell me when I'll get my stuff back".
Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point.
My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
Laws already attempt to encode intent through technical word choices, scoped definitions, and careful construction. Judges and lawyers attempt to discern the intent by careful reading and logical deconstruction.
When the lawmakers and judicial interpreters are good at their jobs this works great. Good lawmakers draft good laws that are clear in their intent. Good courts make good decisions by applying reasonable interpretations of the law.
Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.
How does encapsulating the "intent" into its own section of the law fix the problem? Bad lawmakers will still write vague intent sections as well as poorly defined implementations. Bad lawyers will abuse the vague intent sections to argue for exceptions and novel interpretations of the implementation section. Bad judges will let this fly and warp the system further through bad precedent.
That is how European Union directives and regulations are written, as it happens. The 'recitals' outline the general aims of the legislation, acting as a sort of preamble.
> The recitals are legally non-binding. However, the recitals can be relevant. Courts often use the recitals to interpret a particular – legally binding – provision of EU legislation, especially if multiple interpretations of a certain provision are possible.
It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in the rulebook.
> if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
>Sometimes vagueness is a necessary lubricant to get enough agreement on something, but I take your point.
Seems to me that a vague law is simply an invalid law. The rule of law requires the clear knowledge of what exactly is illegal, if that isn't clear then its simply a prospective law that doesn't meet the basic requires to be law.
this intent/implementation duality was codified by the chevron precedent that was just overturned by the supreme court.
the legislature was responsible for establishing intent, and the executive was responsible for implementation, and the judiciary branch was responsible for resolving disputes.
but the supreme court ruled that the legislative intent has been too vague, and the executive has been too whimsical with implementation. so the legislature must be more specific, or leave it to the judiciary to establish details.
> laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation"
That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those.
Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
It is much more difficult to establish standards of intent interpretation than it is to establish standards of statutory interpretation. One could imagine a law written as follows:
In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins, the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments. The minimum temperature shall not be greater than -18C.
There are some gaps that a court needs to fill in order to apply this statute:
- The health department and the area of effect are not specified but these can be assumed to be the health department and area connected to whatever legislature passed the statute. If there is no health department that is the obvious one -- if, for example, it was passed by a city legislature and the city has no health department -- this could introduce some difficulty.
- The use of "minimum" and "shall not be greater" together in this statute are confused and confusing but since it pertains to freezers, the court can infer that freezers must be set to temperatures of -18C or below (-19C, &c).
However, sorting out the true intent presents insoluble problems that would lead to inconsistent interpretation of the law. Perhaps an establishment only has frozen fish. Does this law apply to them? Generally, the rule is that clear intent clauses -- "In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins..." -- are ignored in statutory interpretation. The operative part of the statute is that "...the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments." and that the temperature established by the health department must be -18C or below.
I love this and think about the same. Similarly, in a work setting, I used to decree that any subsequent decrees (eg: tooling, commit/lint rules, languages) must come with the intent, the desired results, and the expected costs. This made it much less political to suggest changes to our process while simultaneously eliminating some of the low effort "let's use <framework-of-the-week>" statements. I also want to believe it made it so ideas could come from anyone, not just people with titles or social capital, although I don't have any hard proof of that.
IANAL, but I don’t think they are supposed to. They decide the case in front of them: 14 months is too long. And give some insight as to why and what the might be in other cases, but that’s not authoritative.
We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.
I seem to remember something about "justice delayed".
Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
> This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich
The best part is the insulting pretense that it’s all very rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it’s convenient.
If you watch kids often enough you’ll occasionally observe the kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding fair play, etc. These bully’s become lawyers instead of cops.
The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that it’s easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting impacts. It’s all so fragile.
One way that a time cap or caps could be set is by legislation, as you mention; but judges don't write legislation. There is a way the rules develop as "common law" -- via judicial decisions -- but frequently that involves a process of gradual firming up through several cases that cover different situations. For example:
- There would be cases where a person's medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days.
- There would be cases where a person's groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks.
- And so on.
It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.
It is very common to naively think laws should be rewritten to be clearer but experience quickly shows why that doesn’t work. Basically laws can only work when they are interpreted by reasonable jurists because the real world is full of grey areas and human language is not clear enough to fully divide the space of “everything that can happen in the world” into clear legal and illegal categories.
In programming terms, an appeal’s court deciding an exact number of days police can confiscate property is like hard coding in a global constant that then can never be changed, deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that, which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of the file that people see and can have input into.
I once heard of a behavioral economics paper that said you can reliably predict a judge's ruling on a legal or ethics matter based on what is best for the legal profession.
This is why judicial records are so secret that you can't even subpoena exculpatory evidence from them. They want to protect the image of the judicial system. So old fashioned. In today's world, you build trust with transparency... assuming your organization isn't rotten...
As the article reports, the ruling actually states that the amount of time must be reasonable. Any gross or blatant violation would be picked up by any lawyer or judge.
Let's invent a new programming language that tells its users that the amount of time for which they hold memory should be "reasonable", without getting into specifics. This means the language can reclaim memory whenever it deems a violation has occurred. How well do you think would that work for the program? Not very well.
It's not useless at all. It provides the framework for lawyers all across the nation to contest property detentions on a case by case basis, some will find sympathetic judgments, and the facts behind the case law results will be cited and reused in further rulings.
It's not useless because indefinite means never. At least this will require police departments to define the time and therefore make it less likely the stuff walks off, which will encourage keeping it for shorter periods of time.
Indefinite does not mean never; that's what infinite means. An indefinite amount of time means not a definitive amount of time; i.e. "we don't know how long".
It is almost useless because (1) it does not specify a term that should be zero by default and (2) it still requires another court to decide what "reasonable" means in each case, with the time and cost associated with boing to court.
A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).
> This is a well-intentioned but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held.
This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it back after 14 days.
It however does provide the very useful definition of why it can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for retaining it.
"James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with an additional 3,318 years"
The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US
I suspect that this pattern for sentencing is so that even if some charges/convictions are reversed the remaining sentence makes that reversal not really significant in real-world terms.
It would not be up to the police to define but a court.
And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.
Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.
That's all very convenient for the police, but not at all for the individual. Real life of an individual does have hard time caps, for the duration of their expected life, for how many days they can go without food, without a livelihood, etc. When the police seizes property, they affect these things for an individual. There are time caps to each of these things for the individual.
Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
I wouldn't call it useless, the decision is pretty clear on when property can be held:
> If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the plaintiffs’ effects dissipated, and if no new justification for retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged the MPD to return the plaintiffs’ effects.
...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay:
> we do not suggest that it must always return the property instantaneously.
Matching a person with his effects can be difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory.
The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.
This is easily bypassed and/or worked around. What is to prevent an indefinite investigation? The FBI D.B Cooper case was open for decades, for example.
With qualified immunity on the books, if the police reach into your car and steal something important then you're out of luck. I'm not optimistic that better definitions around this particular method of theft would have any effect at all on the fruits of that power imbalance.
I don't think it's remotely practical to have a hard limit because what's entirely reasonable in some cases is entirely unreasonable in others.
Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break that limit they automatically become liable for replacement with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.
I think a lot of your complaint is a result of too many laws. Why don't we establish principles instead of trying to nail down every edge case. It's the edge cases that enrich the legal profession and leave the law open to abuse.
All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to punish a certain individual or company (tiktok).
It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the intent.
Exemptions for edge cases would benefit only the government. Moreover, the exemptions would take away the individual's rights even more, which is exactly what the citizenry need to guard against.
A court can set a more relaxed upper bound at say 60 days. A legislative body can then come in and set a tighter bound at say 30 days, or at any value that doesn't exceed 60 days. In this way, a court can indeed set a hard limit. How is rational decision making supposed to work without numbers?
> but largely useless ruling because it fails to define the maximum duration for which property can be held. As such, it's up to the police as to what qualifies as indefinite. If the ruling had capped it to 14 or 30 days, that would be a useful ruling.
Not always correct as a principle.
To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more.
For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case'.
Anyway to the point how much would people think is 'reasonable'?
10 years - no way
5 years - no way
(unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial)
1 year - probably not
1 month - might be to short
... and so on.
I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the 'last minute' with timing and so on.
There is a cap implied. The only reasonable reason to hold the property is for evidence. Once the statue of limitation runs out, or the appeals process is exhausted, there is no reasonable reason to hold the property anymore.
The Supreme Court has said it isn’t unconstitutional as a general matter, so a lower court’s ruling won’t force that to change. And because the practice is a holdover from English law and isn’t understood (as a historical matter) to be something the constitution was meant to alter, there isn’t much basis for thinking the Supreme Court would reverse its earlier decisions.
This seems like a strong candidate for a Constitutional amendment. Twelve amendments were ratified in the 20th century—about once a decade since the end of the Civil War. However, if you exclude the 27th Amendment[1], we haven't ratified an amendment in 53 years. My favorite type of amendment is one that extends rights to people, and in this case, also to their property.
[1] The 27th Amendment took a different path compared to the other 16 amendments ratified since the Bill of Rights. It was originally proposed as part of the first 12 amendments but took 202 years to be ratified. This was largely due to the efforts of a University of Texas student in the 1980s, who, motivated by a C grade on a paper, embarked on a mission to see it finally adopted.
How do they align that reasoning with the 4th? Particularly the conservative wing of the bench, as they seem most likely to be literalists (when it suits, at least).
I spent hundreds of hours hanging out in forfeiture court, it's wild. The court I was in eventually got a new judge and she took the two DAs aside and said to them "This bullshit you have going here, the 90% of cases you win because people don't even know how to fill out the paperwork. That ends today. That will not fly in my courtroom."
I remember that same day a dad came in. The State had his new $60K SUV they were trying to sell. His son had swiped the keys, taken it, got caught drunk-driving. The DAs were like "well, tough shit, it's the law" and that judge said "Did this man know his son took the car? Does he have valid insurance? Give this man his damned car back. And I want you to pay all his towing and storage fees too." "His towing fee too?" "Yes" "We don't even know how to refund that, the city has that money." "Well, you have an hour to find out. See you in an hour." LOL
If you are ever caught up in a civil forfeiture, make sure to stay on top of the paperwork. Most people lose their stuff by not doing the very simple paperwork. If you get to the first court hearing the State often gives up if it's not much value.
I wonder if judicial solutions can ever be adequate as police can simply say that an investigation is ongoing for years. And determining whether ongoing possession of seized property is legitimate involves disclosing investigation details.
How is that different than, say, indefinite detention? It’s obviously not implemented perfectly, but habeas corpus is uncontroversial at least in principle. I don’t see anything mechanistically unique about property seizure that would make this tricky to solve.
There was a proposal back in the discussion of extending copyright to be "forever minus one day" by the maximalist camp which included Sonny Bono, so there are hacks around "indefinitely".
Hmm, does my money have the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed?
The standard for arrest, probable cause, is far too weak to be any basis for indefinitely seizing property. A precedent ruling on this by the Supreme Court would be welcome, but it's hard to say which way it would go, given the current makeup of the court.
I lose track of whether the conservative members of the court are pro-constitution, pro-defendant or pro-police in criminal justice issues like this.
Over the last decade (realizing the court has changed a lot) they've made some pretty decent pro-rights decisions in criminal cases where people thought they would be pro-police.
Interesting fact, police seizure (police stealing from people who are arrested, even if they are never prosecuted) is more than criminal theft. In other words, police steal more from people than criminals.
I thought this was an obviously ridiculous statement, and then I looked it up. In many of the last 25 years, civil asset forfeiture outpaces criminal burglary in total losses.
Wow. I thought civil asset forfeiture was a messed up problem before…
I would say that you don't live in a real country if the government can just arbitrarily take your stuff from you legally. It makes it doubly absurd that the US wants to export this "democracy".
Step 2: hold onto it for an indefinite period of time
Step 3: steal the property
Step 4: when the owner comes for their stuff, claim the property went missing
Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn't come because the property isn't worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit with cops for what's usually small claims
None of this is going to change unless you prevent cops from handling seized property.
> Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn't come because the property isn't worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit with cops for what's usually small claims
Any time I hear the word reasonable in a law, I throw up my hands. That word is not concrete. It's the "give up on life pants" of legalese. Respect yourself and others, if you can't define proper limits then you don't know what you want or how to get it. In which case you should leave everyone else in peace.
Idk where you come from, but defining is hard. It's really hard to define a table or a chair. You can come up with some definition, but probably someone has a table or a chair that doesn't fit it.
Defining what's reasonable is much harder, but it can be parceled out through individual cases, and slowly build jurisprudence.
Defining is not hard. You can say "a table is a flat board with four support structures roughly 1 m (+/- 5 cm) in height, built for the purpose of keeping things off the ground". Anything that fits that description is a table, and anything that doesn't, isn't. Supposed tables with three legs, or Japanese tables, aren't tables by this definition; they are something else. Perhaps this is a problem, or perhaps it isn't.
I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn't completely encompass a situation is better than a loose guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the guideline will always leave room for bickering about interpretation.
It is hard. Its insanely hard. Hard things are hard. So put the effort in. You will get things wrong and have to fix them, but saying "reasonable" doesn't mean you've solved anything. You've just made it someone elses problem.
It's actually the entire point of the way that a well designed law is written, say enough to make the extreme cases unambigous, say little enough that the judiciary can decide the rest. It's an intentional design element that balances power between the legislative and judiciary branches.
> if you can't define proper limits then you don't know what you want or how to get it
What if what you want is simply for the onus to be on the cops to defend why they need to do something, instead of it just being assumed they can do whatever they want?
While this is nice, it seems to only be addressing “I was arrested and the police seized my stuff”.
E.g it does nothing to stop “the police stopped me, stole my stuff, and then sent me on my way”. E.g the case where there is not even the accusation of a crime has even less restrictions than when you are accused of a crime.
Certainly my anecdata from spending time with a lot of detainees in Chicago is that it was impressively common for the police to find something incriminating on you, and also find some cash, and just take everything and send you on your way.
The last couple of years has made the police a lot more honest due to prevalence of bodycams.
Readit News
A hard time cap is essential because one's life too has a cap. The amount of time for which one can go without earning a livelihood also has a cap. Imagine if prison sentences didn't have a time cap.
This illustrates a common problem with our laws. They're very often vaguely defined, needlessly so, in a way that keeps attorneys and judges very rich, and the police abusive, to the detriment of the individual. In a sensible world, the laws would all be rewritten for clarity and consistency, starting with the Constitution.
Eventually I got a letter saying I had to show up and prove I wasnt going to do drugs with it. So I showed up with my invoice.
Then I was told I had to submit fingerprints and sign a letter promising I wasnt going to do drugs and I refused.
Finally a month later they sent me a letter saying I had forfeited the money and I showed up again (took a day off work) and they said I had to go to court. So I went to court, and the judge spent ten minutes telling the cops that didnt show up I had to get my money back.
Next month after that I got a call saying I had property to pick up and that I'd be fined daily if I didnt. So I got the money back.
Glad you eventually got your money.
On a side note, how did they find the money? Or was this an expensive lesson in why not to consent to a search?
Practically in California, you’re required to turn them all in for storage or sell them within 24 hrs of being served - either selling them to a dealer or turning them in to the cops or to a very hard to find, expensive, and specialized type of gun dealer who doesn’t advertise.
Keep in mind - accused - not a finding of or anything - and the court is happy to issue these orders ex-parte based off accusations which the impacted party has no chance to rebut or is necessarily even aware of at the time the order is issued. And the bar to issue it is very, very low. The accusations don’t even need to make sense or be supported by any police calls or the like.
In theory? Fine. In practice, a very common abuse and harassment tactic. Or actually necessary.
If you can’t find the specialized type of dealer and get him everything within 24 hrs, and can’t sell everything for penny’s on the dollar to a standard gun dealer in time, then you have to turn them into the cops. Or be committing a felony.
Oh and the court will demand proof when you go to reply to/contest the emergency order that you did everything within the requisite amount of time, and did indeed turn everything in.
In Santa Clara county - among others - apparently the cops will also never actually return the guns to you either. Because ‘it would look bad if you then used them in a crime’. Yes, this is clearly against the law. They DGAF.
There are multiple outstanding lawsuits against them for this, last I checked, but the courts keep putting them on the back burner as after the Judge Persky recall no one wants to be involved in anything like this in the current political climate.
They’d much rather drag it out for years or even decades over procedural matters.
Even if it’s really clear what the legal thing to do is.
One or two guns, not a lot of money. But folks with collections? Better not piss off anyone you’re living with.
I mean that's not even pretending to 'protect and serve', unless we change subject from 'citizens' to 'ourselves'. I would expect such stories from say Russia or some parts of Africa, not champion of free world.
Dead Comment
My personal "fun idea" is that laws should have two parts, an "intent" part and an "implementation" part and if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
When the lawmakers and judicial interpreters are good at their jobs this works great. Good lawmakers draft good laws that are clear in their intent. Good courts make good decisions by applying reasonable interpretations of the law.
Bad lawmakers fail to make their intent clear. Bad lawyers take advantage of vague laws to argue for unreasonable intent. Bad judges let these bad arguments fly.
How does encapsulating the "intent" into its own section of the law fix the problem? Bad lawmakers will still write vague intent sections as well as poorly defined implementations. Bad lawyers will abuse the vague intent sections to argue for exceptions and novel interpretations of the implementation section. Bad judges will let this fly and warp the system further through bad precedent.
> The recitals are legally non-binding. However, the recitals can be relevant. Courts often use the recitals to interpret a particular – legally binding – provision of EU legislation, especially if multiple interpretations of a certain provision are possible.
From https://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/p/how-to-read-eu-legislat...
It is unfortunate that our representatives are as such, that they don't strive for clarity, but I understand. To me, the lack of clarity is an "invalid state" that has no place in the rulebook.
> if a court decides at some future time that the law fails to accomplish the intent it should be struck down.
This would be very welcome, but it should require repeated testings in fibonacci years, not merely once. This means at 1, 2, 3, 5, ... years after the law was passed or updated.
Seems to me that a vague law is simply an invalid law. The rule of law requires the clear knowledge of what exactly is illegal, if that isn't clear then its simply a prospective law that doesn't meet the basic requires to be law.
the legislature was responsible for establishing intent, and the executive was responsible for implementation, and the judiciary branch was responsible for resolving disputes.
but the supreme court ruled that the legislative intent has been too vague, and the executive has been too whimsical with implementation. so the legislature must be more specific, or leave it to the judiciary to establish details.
That's a common opinion between lawyers, the opposite opinion is that since the law was created by a large group of people, it can never have a clear intent. There are judges that assign to both of those.
Anyway, IMO there's fundamentally inhumane and evil consequence to the idea that laws don't have intent. Even if it's objectively true. The entire dichotomy is broken.
In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins, the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments. The minimum temperature shall not be greater than -18C.
There are some gaps that a court needs to fill in order to apply this statute:
- The health department and the area of effect are not specified but these can be assumed to be the health department and area connected to whatever legislature passed the statute. If there is no health department that is the obvious one -- if, for example, it was passed by a city legislature and the city has no health department -- this could introduce some difficulty.
- The use of "minimum" and "shall not be greater" together in this statute are confused and confusing but since it pertains to freezers, the court can infer that freezers must be set to temperatures of -18C or below (-19C, &c).
However, sorting out the true intent presents insoluble problems that would lead to inconsistent interpretation of the law. Perhaps an establishment only has frozen fish. Does this law apply to them? Generally, the rule is that clear intent clauses -- "In order to facilitate the safe enjoyment of ice cream, puff pastry and pizzas of diverse origins..." -- are ignored in statutory interpretation. The operative part of the statute is that "...the health department shall regulate the minimum temperature of freezers in grocery stores, restaurants and other establishments." and that the temperature established by the health department must be -18C or below.
We will have to wait for more cases to refine the time limit and other factors that impact it.
I seem to remember something about "justice delayed".
Sure these things are complicated. But coming to a just conclusion sooner rather than later should also be a goal, not just dotting Is and crossing Ts. Of course for law specialists such as lawyers and judges minutiae seem important. But to me it seems the overall goal of the entire concept has been forgotten. Or maybe is ignored on purpose.
But as things are, we have wait for some random court case to bubble up.
The best part is the insulting pretense that it’s all very rigorous and formal, and that it requires a giant intellect years of training to appreciate the intricacies of the legal and ethical calculus these chosen few are dealing with every day. But the closest things to axioms are precedent, basic rights, etc and these are routinely ignored whenever it’s convenient.
If you watch kids often enough you’ll occasionally observe the kind of bully who is actually kind of smart. They make up rules for a game, describe just enough so that play can begin, and then enforce them arbitrarily, add new ones when necessary to keep power, and generally pick on whoever they were going to pick on anyway but do it under the appearances of upholding fair play, etc. These bully’s become lawyers instead of cops.
The actual intent of the rule of law and civilized society in general is wholly predicated on these kids being outnumbered by some equally argumentative children who happen to actually be concerned with fairness, or at least consistency. This needs to happen in every generation forever, regardless of the fact that it’s easier and more profitable to be a jerk, and that being a jerk gets you to places where you can have longer lasting impacts. It’s all so fragile.
- There would be cases where a person's medications were confiscated; the courts would probably find that these need to be returned within a few days.
- There would be cases where a person's groceries were confiscated along with their car; perhaps the courts would find that the groceries don't have to be returned at all but rather their value replaced (it is hard to set a consistent timeline for groceries since crackers are good for weeks but ice cream in a car is good for maybe a few hours) whereas the car must be returned within a few weeks.
- And so on.
It generally isn't up to a court, faced with a specific case, to come up with a rule that covers a wide variety of dissimilar, if related, situations. Information for those situations is not generally covered in the case before them so it would be hard for them to make a good decision. They also aren't tasked to go get that information, since their job is to decide a particular as in an expeditious manner.
In programming terms, an appeal’s court deciding an exact number of days police can confiscate property is like hard coding in a global constant that then can never be changed, deep in an obscure file. The legislature should decide that, which is more like making a big visible constant at the top of the file that people see and can have input into.
A good ruling would be "by default zero time is allowed, ask a judge for exceptions when justified". If you release the person, release all their possessions at the same time. Need an exception? Make it the burden on police to convince a judge this is justified, not let it to the police to arbitrarily do whatever they want - like 14 months, now reduced to what, 13.9? (exaggeration for a good purpose).
This is because a hard maximum duration would result in either things being held until the end of a 5 year period because they can or evidence being lost because the police need to give it back after 14 days.
It however does provide the very useful definition of why it can be held. They must release it when they have no purpose for retaining it.
"James Holmes, the perpetrator of the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, received an astonishing 12 life sentences along with an additional 3,318 years"
The cap is the heat death of the universe for the US
And that’s why times aren’t given. Legal precedent can adapt to time, changing views, and corner cases far more easily than a hard number can.
Police would implement their policy knowing that if they keep an item too long they may have to go to court over it. They wouldn’t have a hard number at first, but the system that results could be better and more adaptable than if a legislator just said “45 days”.
Imagine if a prison sentence failed to define the duration of the sentence, and it was left to the prison to keep the individual for as long as the prison wants.
> If the rationales that justified the initial retention of the plaintiffs’ effects dissipated, and if no new justification for retaining the effects arose, then the Fourth Amendment obliged the MPD to return the plaintiffs’ effects.
...and even addresses acceptable reasons for delay:
> we do not suggest that it must always return the property instantaneously. Matching a person with his effects can be difficult, as can the logistics of storage and inventory.
The court's opinion is basically that once the criminal complaint is resolved and the investigation is terminated, the gov't has no reason to hold the property and it must be returned. If it takes them a few days or weeks to get the stuff out of inventory and coordinate the return that's fine, but they can't continue holding it just because they feel like it.
Rather, how about a *short* limit for how long something can be held without relevant charges being filed. And if they break that limit they automatically become liable for replacement with a *new* item (or replacement with the newer version if the version they took is no longer reasonably available.) The only true way to combat misbehavior is to make it uneconomic.
They'd be paying for it with our money. Standard economic drives don't affect organizations that are funded with someone else's money.
All these new laws "for the internet." When we could just follow the intent of existing laws. Though, for some reason we rarely codify intent and instead lean toward making laws to punish a certain individual or company (tiktok).
It's illogical and undermines the law. I guess that is the intent.
How confident are you this has no good exceptions? That’s why a reasonableness standard exists. To permit edge cases.
I've always thought a constitutional amendment to make every law in the books auto sunset, unless explicitly voted in by congress
I would think this would have made the PATRIOT ACT obsolete some time ago, among other things
However, I agree there should be a lot of simplification and there is a lot of overregulation and contradictions.
Not always correct as a principle.
To define a time period also means the police will tend to keep the property at least as long (or even a bit longer) than the time period listed. If the time is 'reasonable' (and yes that can vary for sure) it's ambiguous enough to make someone wonder if they would be called out as 'unreasonable' and that in itself (in many but not all cases) makes them think a bit more.
For example you will notice that at takeout places there are no signs saying how many forks or ketchup you can take (it's implied 'reasonable'). Imagine if the sign said 'you can take no more than 5 forks' my guess is many people would then think 'it's ok I don't need to forks but since I can I will take 5 forks just in case'.
Anyway to the point how much would people think is 'reasonable'?
10 years - no way 5 years - no way (unless needed for a specific purpose ie a trial) 1 year - probably not 1 month - might be to short
... and so on.
I'm not saying so much a time shouldn't be applied but that it's not always apparent and also people tend to push to the 'last minute' with timing and so on.
For many serious crimes, they don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment
[1] The 27th Amendment took a different path compared to the other 16 amendments ratified since the Bill of Rights. It was originally proposed as part of the first 12 amendments but took 202 years to be ratified. This was largely due to the efforts of a University of Texas student in the 1980s, who, motivated by a C grade on a paper, embarked on a mission to see it finally adopted.
So while this might be a very old bug in the Rule of Law, it got much worse during the 20th Century.
I remember that same day a dad came in. The State had his new $60K SUV they were trying to sell. His son had swiped the keys, taken it, got caught drunk-driving. The DAs were like "well, tough shit, it's the law" and that judge said "Did this man know his son took the car? Does he have valid insurance? Give this man his damned car back. And I want you to pay all his towing and storage fees too." "His towing fee too?" "Yes" "We don't even know how to refund that, the city has that money." "Well, you have an hour to find out. See you in an hour." LOL
If you are ever caught up in a civil forfeiture, make sure to stay on top of the paperwork. Most people lose their stuff by not doing the very simple paperwork. If you get to the first court hearing the State often gives up if it's not much value.
(6th Amendment)
I lose track of whether the conservative members of the court are pro-constitution, pro-defendant or pro-police in criminal justice issues like this.
Over the last decade (realizing the court has changed a lot) they've made some pretty decent pro-rights decisions in criminal cases where people thought they would be pro-police.
Their recent decisions are garbage fires, though.
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Wow. I thought civil asset forfeiture was a messed up problem before…
Step 2: hold onto it for an indefinite period of time
Step 3: steal the property
Step 4: when the owner comes for their stuff, claim the property went missing
Step 5: wait for a lawsuit that usually doesn't come because the property isn't worth enough and nobody wants to get in a suit with cops for what's usually small claims
None of this is going to change unless you prevent cops from handling seized property.
Which is why class-action lawsuits are a thing.
Defining what's reasonable is much harder, but it can be parceled out through individual cases, and slowly build jurisprudence.
I would argue that an imperfect definition that doesn't completely encompass a situation is better than a loose guideline, because the definition is unambiguous, while the guideline will always leave room for bickering about interpretation.
What if what you want is simply for the onus to be on the cops to defend why they need to do something, instead of it just being assumed they can do whatever they want?
E.g it does nothing to stop “the police stopped me, stole my stuff, and then sent me on my way”. E.g the case where there is not even the accusation of a crime has even less restrictions than when you are accused of a crime.
The last couple of years has made the police a lot more honest due to prevalence of bodycams.
Shouldn’t this have been obviously unconstitutional since like 1800?
If it just said it prohibited seizure, or prohibited asset seizure past 30 days or something to that effect, it would be much easier.
But because it doesn't, we have to interpret the language. This is a difficult proposition; it's literally open for interpretation.
Like most things in the constitution, it's messy, but still pretty good.
It’s not like AI or guns where the tech is totally different. “Don’t take my stuff forever” hasn’t changed much. :)