Friday, January 23, 2015

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

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