What Do Cops Do With Confiscated Money
A pair of New Mexico businessmen were driving forth Interstate xl in Oklahoma late one night in April when a sheriff's deputy flipped on his lights and sirens and pulled over their BMW sedan.
The two men, Nang Thai and Weichuan Liu, were on their manner to a hotel in Oklahoma City. They planned to catch some sleep before heading out in the forenoon to close on a ten-acre plot of farmland they'd agreed to purchase for $100,000.
But now, at about 2 a.one thousand. on Apr 19, a Canadian Canton sheriff'southward deputy was peering into their auto.
"Nosotros didn't understand why he pulled us over," said Thai, 51, a Vietnamese immigrant and male parent of 2 from Albuquerque. "I was driving nether the speed limit."
They had no manner of knowing at the fourth dimension but Thai and Liu were about to begin an hourslong ordeal that would leave them stripped of all their greenbacks and searching for answers. Their experience highlights the controversial police force enforcement do known as civil asset forfeiture, in which police tin confiscate a person's greenbacks or other property even without bringing criminal charges.
The deputy asked the two men for their licenses, where they were going and whether they were conveying whatever coin, according to Thai.
They had a large corporeality of cash in the vehicle: more than $100,000, which Thai says they brought to pay for the holding. Thai — who speaks English language with a heavy emphasis (Liu speaks very little English language at all) — told the officer they were headed to a hotel and, yeah, had greenbacks on them.
The deputy said he suspected they were involved in "illegal activity," according to Thai. A criminal groundwork search would have turned up a 2017 confidence against Liu for growing marijuana in California.
After a second officeholder arrived at the scene, the men were driven to a law station and interrogated for hours. Deputies emptied a backpack and suitcase full of cash, then pulled apart the inside of the BMW but plain turned upwards no guns, drugs or any other illicit items.
Thai said he told his interrogators they had saved upward the money for years and were planning to use the land for farming just hadn't even so adamant which crops to enhance.
"They kept saying, 'This is illegal money,'" Thai said. "I said, 'Okay, prove it. We didn't do anything illegal.'"
The two men were released without existence charged or fifty-fifty issued a traffic ticket, just the Canadian County Sheriff's Office did not render their cash. Courtroom papers filed by Commune Attorney Michael Fields say the money was seized because it was intended to be used to violate drug laws or resulted from illegal drug transactions.
The men are now fighting to become it back. Calculation insult to injury, they contend that the corporeality the sheriff's office says information technology confiscated – $131,500 – is really $10,000 short of the total they had in their automobile that twenty-four hour period.
"Now I accept to prove I'1000 innocent, and they are the ones who illegally took my coin and basically stole some of my money, likewise," said Thai.
The court docket contains no records detailing the traffic stop or the seizure, and neither the sheriff's office nor the district attorney's office agreed to annotate.
Among those surprised by the turn of events is the man who was ready to sell his land to Thai and Liu.
"I was shocked when I heard of the confiscation of their money," the seller told NBC News.
He said he had met with them a few days earlier and had drawn upward a contract to sell the property to Thai for $100,000. NBC News has viewed a copy of the agreement.
"They seemed like very nice and intelligent business organisation people," said the seller, who spoke on the status of anonymity. "I feel bad for them and the situation."
What happened to Thai and Liu is not at all unusual.
Federal and local police force enforcement take broad authority in many parts of the country to seize a person'southward property if information technology is suspected to be linked to criminal activity. Civil asset forfeiture allows the authorities to confiscate items similar cash and cars even without charging the people forced to surrender their property.
Defenders of the practice say it'south a vital tool in fighting drug traffickers, who are known to hide ill-gotten cash in vehicles and other items. But critics across the political spectrum argue that it violates constitutional rights and disproportionately impacts minorities and depression-income people who are more probable to be profiled past police and less likely to have the resources to claiming the seizures.
"Billions of dollars are taken yearly from citizens who are never charged with a crime, and are non afforded any of the due procedure provisions of the Constitution, such as a day in court, presumption of innocence, correct to counsel, and an impartial jury," said Brad Cates, former manager of the Justice Department'due south Asset Forfeiture Office during the Reagan Administration who has become an outspoken critic of civil forfeiture.
So far this yr, local police force enforcement agencies confiscated more than $1.iii one thousand thousand from people driving through Canadian County, according to an NBC News review of court records.
At least 58 percent of the 31 greenbacks seizures involved minorities only – with Asian people making upwards 23 percent, Black 19 percent and Hispanic 16 percent. White people accounted for 26 percent of the forfeitures in Canadian County, which is more than 75 percent white.
Only 14 out of the 31 cash forfeitures resulted in criminal charges, or 45 pct, court records show.
In 2020, some 43 percent of the 53 cash seizures in Canadian Canton involved minorities. Black people accounted for 18 percent, Hispanic 17 pct, Asian 7 percent and white 26 per centum, according to the NBC News review. The greenbacks seizures yielded more than $1.viii million dollars, court records testify, and 31 of the 53 resulted in criminal charges, or 58 per centum.
The loftier pct of minorities subjected to greenbacks seizures in Canadian County is not a new trend.
The nonprofit investigative news site Oklahoma Watch establish that 60 percent of the cash seizures in Canadian County between 2010 and 2015 involved minorities. Nine other counties in Oklahoma, including the six largest, had roughly the same percentage over that five-twelvemonth time flow, co-ordinate to Oklahoma Spotter.
Megan Lambert, legal manager for the American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma, said she found the figures on cash forfeitures and race "in no way surprising."
"Racism and implicit bias accept a greater bear on where discretion is allowed, and police enjoy a significant amount of discretion over civil asset forfeitures," she said. "The lack of accountability or transparency and the perverse financial incentives of civil asset forfeiture make the procedure ripe for abuse and bias."
"Highway robbers"
More 30 states have instituted reforms in contempo years to protect people from civil asset forfeiture, such every bit shifting the burden of proof to the authorities. Others — like New Mexico, North Carolina, Nebraska and Maine — have abolished it all together.
Merely Oklahoma is not among the states to take significant action to curtail the practice.
It has amidst the worst civil forfeiture laws in the country, according to the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based public interest law firm that releases reports grading state forfeiture laws. Oklahoma earned a D-minus course in the latest Institute for Justice report, which cited the low bar for confiscating cash and the large incentive created past the seized money going direct to the law enforcement agencies themselves.
"The government but has to show by a preponderance of evidence, or more likely than not, the property is continued to illegal action," said Dan Alban, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice. "That's a very low burden of proof. It effectively places the burden on the property possessor to prove their own innocence."
Canadian Canton straddles Interstate xl, a major drug trafficking corridor that runs from California to the North Carolina coast. The county sheriff's office and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol devote substantial resource to combating it. Just civil liberties lawyers and local defense attorneys fence that law enforcement uses the focus on drug interdiction every bit cover for stopping and searching vehicles on flimsy pretenses.
William Campbell, an Oklahoma City-based defense chaser with expertise challenging civil forfeitures, said in any other context the officers, who are known to target cars with out of state license plates, would be seen as "common highway robbers."
"It doesn't matter whether you're innocent or annihilation else," said Campbell. "They're going to do whatsoever they're going to do — generally in the night, on the side of the road in the eye of nowhere — where you equally the citizen are completely at their mercy."
"District attorneys fund their offices with this money," he added. "When the DA is making half a meg or more off of these stops, how tin they be an honest broker on whether these stops are adept? They have no incentive to stop this."
Canadian County Sheriff Chris West declined to comment on the use of civil forfeiture or the case of Liu and Thai. A well-known figure in Oklahoma, West faced controversy before this year when it emerged that he attended the Jan. 6 rally in Washington protesting one-time President Trump's election loss. He said he walked to the Capitol but did non enter the building or participate in mob violence.
Calls to District Attorney Michael Fields' office were referred to the prosecutor treatment the case, Mitchell Thrower, who did not respond to a request for comment. At a 2015 hearing for a doomed bill to reform civil forfeiture laws in Oklahoma, Fields voiced his opposition to legislation that would, among other things, prohibit forfeiture without a confidence.
"Asset forfeiture is the just tool at our disposal that allows us to take drugs off the streets and profits out of the hands of those who but seek more drugs, more money and more lives to destroy," Fields said.
Four decades of savings
Thai said he was 16 when he arrived in the U.South. on a boat from Vietnam in 1986. After graduating high school in Albuquerque, he attended community college and and so worked at Intel for sixteen years as a technical engineer and information annotator. He went on to open up and run a restaurant, the Asian Grill, until 2019.
Thai says he saved a clamper of coin over the years and largely eschewed banks. "In my culture, nosotros use cash," he said.
Seeking a prophylactic investment, he said he began studying vertical farming, which involves growing crops in vertical stacks using hydroponics, and looking around for a cheap piece of land to purchase. He found a partner in Liu, who he met through the Albuquerque restaurant scene.
"You never lose coin if you buy a piece of farm land," Thai said. "That's why Neb Gates bought so much country."
Thai said he told the officers who grilled him that they had worked hard for their money and had no firm plans on what they were going to do with the land.
"He kept asking where did the money come from? Where did I work?" Thai said. "I said, 'I lived here a long time. I worked many years.'"
Later the interrogations were over and the deputies let the men go, they received no paperwork related to the forfeiture, Thai said. Campbell, the local defense lawyer not involved in the case, said police enforcement is supposed to issue property receipts detailing what was seized but doesn't always exercise and then.
The Canadian County Commune Attorney filed a observe of forfeiture on April 22, which gave Thai and Liu 45 days to file a claim to the cash. Their attorney responded on May ten, denying that the money was connected to drug activity and asserting that the forfeiture violated their Fourth Subpoena rights.
The lawyer for Thai and Liu, Richard Anderson, did not respond to requests for comment.
Through a translator, Liu declined to annotate.
He was arrested in June 2017 later on law found more than 600 marijuana plants at a house he was staying in with two others in Stockton, Calif. Liu, now 45, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of cultivating marijuana and served 30 days in the county jail, said a spokeswoman for the San Joaquin County District Attorney's Office.
In the days after the Oklahoma traffic stop, a Canadian County prosecutor suggested to a local newspaper that the cash seizure was based on their intention to grow marijuana.
Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018. Under country law, at least 75 percent of a medical marijuana business organization must be owned by an Oklahoma resident for information technology to be licensed.
"An out-of-state person, for instance, can't come to Oklahoma and start their own marijuana subcontract," Canadian County Assistant Commune Chaser Eric Epplin told the Yukon Progress, speaking mostly about the case. "You have to be a resident of the state."
The regulation allows for someone to movement to the state and apply for a license after 2 years.
Thai said he was aware of the licensing requirements but insisted that they weren't set on growing cannabis.
"That'southward their narrative that they're using confronting us," he said of the law and prosecutors.
"We saw it as a good investment," he added. "We didn't know yet what we were going to do. It could be anything — it could exist marijuana, it could be something else."
James Todd, an Oklahoma City defense lawyer who is not involved in the example, said he thinks prosecutors may have a tough time proving the men intended to use the land to commencement an illegal drug operation.
"I don't see in this instance annihilation other than a 'he said, she said' situation, where the state says they intended to grow marijuana without a license and the men say no they weren't," said Todd, who worked equally a detective and state prosecutor in Oklahoma before condign a defense chaser.
A pre-trial court hearing has been set for October. xx. Thai, meanwhile, has gear up his sights on a new venture closer to dwelling: a bubble tea shop in Albuquerque.
"I've been living here since 1986 and worked difficult for iv decades," Thai said. "I merely want my money back."
Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/highway-robbers-how-trip-buy-farmland-ended-police-taking-all-n1281629
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