"This town’s police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law — which is less permissive than federal law — to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing” of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery."
Sounds like the laws on the books in MA endorse redistribution of wealth. Another reason to stay way from the east coast!
I can explain it to you but I can't understand it for you.
"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him; better take a closer look at the American Indian." - Henry Ford
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges; When the Republic is at its most corrupt the laws are most numerous. - Publius Cornelius Tacitus
..............."Even if no related criminal charges are brought — or even if the defendant manages convincingly to beat those charges — the law enforcement agencies often assert a right to keep the property, giving it back, if at all, only after costly litigation. In the mean time, finding a lawyer to fight the process can be difficult because the government has seized the assets that would ordinarily be used to pay that lawyer.
In recent days a crop of especially outrageous forfeiture stories has been making headlines:
•Nashville’s WTVF exposed a pattern in which some rural Tennessee police agencies stop out-of-state motorists and then seize any large amounts of cash found on the grounds that the motorists could not prove they were not involved in drug trafficking or some other unlawful activity. Read the story and decide whether you would feel more secure driving in Monterey, Tenn. or Monterrey, Mexico
•It’s hard to top the Tennessee story, but Cato Media Fellow Radley Balko has just published a Huffington Post expose of how Wisconsin police seize cash intended for bail money, on the grounds that police dogs sniffed drug residue on it — even though a victim family was able to establish in one instance that the cash had just come from bank ATMs."..............
