Unintended victims in the drug war
By Leonard Pitts
... “Ask your local law enforcement officials if they will be following
Holder’s lead. And if not, why not? Because — and this should go without
saying — in a nation with a constitutional guarantee against
“unreasonable searches and seizures” there is something obscene about a
practice that incentivizes police to, in essence, steal money from
law-abiding citizens and leaves said citizens no reasonable recourse for
getting it back.”
~ ~ ~
We need more than a memo from Eric Holder to stop this asset
forfeiture abuse. Holder’s memo sounds good, but how will it actually
stop this? The truth is that it won’t. Cartel bosses and their minions
are not the ones suffering from this ill conceived policy of letting Law Enforcement
take property without a charge or conviction.
Add drug sniffing dogs for a final insult and you have a winning formula for
harassing the public in search of treasure. If this is all that we can
expect from the Supremes, and the congress keeps sitting on its thumbs,
we can resign ourselves to this new “Bill of Wrongs”.
Just don’t ask me
to salute.
Does anyone feel safer? I think some reformers are right about the creation of a police
state. These unusual solutions, which were meant to win a drug war, have destroyed
our constitution.
We want it back. -TC
