Thread. People don't understand the corruption connected to civil forfeiture. I once had a client arrested for marijuana. The cops used civil forfeiture laws to take his car. The officers would then drive around my client's neighborhood mocking him from his own car.
The cops had followed him around for months pulling him over, and one time they claimed that their drug dog smelled marijuana in his car. After hiring an expert to analyze the records, I later discovered they had fabricated the training records for the drug dog.
But they used this fabrication to get a search warrant for my client's house because judges will sign virtually any drug search warrant police request. They raided his home with a SWAT team and found marijuana and seized his car.
As a public defender, I had numerous other clients who were told by police that their car looked too nice for someone like them, and that the officers couldn't wait to be driving it themselves.
That was in Alabama, but read this linked thread about civil forfeiture in D.C. and almost everywhere across the country. Think about what deeper lessons this standard practice reveals for us about what interests cops serve:
https://twitter.com/equalityAlec/status/1412428329806860288
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