Civil Asset Forfeiture How Long Will Highway Robbery by Cops Continue? David Knight

➡ David Knight talks about Stephen Laura, who used to be in the Marines, had all his saved money taken by police in Nevada. They did this through something called civil asset forfeiture, but they didn’t charge him with any crime. He didn’t give up and sued them. After a while, he got his money back from the DEA. Now, he’s fighting against the rule that let this happen and the officers who took his money. This case shows a big problem: sometimes, rules about taking people’s property can be unfair and leave innocent people with no way to fight back.

But let’s talk a little bit about this civil asset thing, because we got yet another article, and I see it as a positive sign that it’s now not just reason magazine that is writing about this has been a concern for a very long time of libertarians, but now it’s out there with conservatives. And so WND has an article about this. Cops illegally grab a man’s life savings, and now the victim turns the tables.

Officers pull this guy over. They never alleged that he did anything wrong, but because he had cash, and think about that. Think about that. He was guilty because he had cash. And so because he had cash, that must mean that he is involved in some kind of criminal activity. Same kind of thing that Jamie Dimon was just talking about, right? So highway patrol officers simply take the money when they find that travelers have it.

So the Institute of Justice is defending this guy. His name is Stephen Laura, and he’s already won the battle as the DEA that had confiscated his life savings returned the money the day after he filed a lawsuit. But now he’s going after the procedures in Nevada where this happened. He’s going after the officers who stole it. They stole his backpack filled with money. The latest action in this case is that the second judicial district court for the state of Nevada denied the state’s motion to dismiss the complaint by the marine veteran.

That means that Stephen Laura, represented by the Institute of Justice, can continue his legal challenge to the state’s forfeiture scheme, which allows for police to take people’s property without even showing that they committed a crime. They don’t have to charge you, let alone find you guilty, to steal this stuff. A major first step towards justice for him and for all victims of unjust civil forfeiture laws. And again, they’re not really laws, they’re rules.

And they make this phony distinction. They say, well, if this was a law that you violated that was passed by Congress or your elected representatives, then we would have to charge you, find you guilty before we take the stuff. But this is a rule, a rule created by the bureaucracy. It could be the IRS. As a matter of fact, that’s where this all started, was with the IRS.

The IRS would take people’s money, as you probably know, somebody, or maybe it’s happened to you, say, well, we think you owe us more money, prove that you don’t. So they don’t charge you with something. They don’t take you to trial and prove that you didn’t pay the money. You have to prove that you didn’t do it. And they can take it first. And so that is now being done by all these different bureaucracies, but especially by people on interactions with the police, highway patrol, on streets, in the name of the war on drugs.

It’s actually a war of drugs, a war against us. But anyway, they call it civil because it’s a rule coming from the bureaucracy, and they call it forfeiture because they don’t want to call it what it is, which is theft. If the government wants to take your money or your property, it should first have to prove that you did something wrong. So they said the officers who pulled him over never alleged that he did anything wrong, and he cooperated throughout the ordeal.

However, using civil forfeiture, the officers were able to detain him for more than an hour and to take his life savings from him. They left him penniless on the side of the highway without any money to even buy gas to continue his trip. And then the Nevada highway patrol sent the money to the DEA under what they call equitable sharing. That’s the name of this theft program. With the expectation that the DEA would circumvent Nevada law to forfeit the money using more government friendly federal law and then kick back the lion’s share for the Nevada highway patrol to use however it wanted.

Yeah, it’s a shameful little game where they might take 20%, kick 80% of it back to the law enforcement people. This is under this failed prohibition. Prohibition always turns into a criminal enterprise where it corrupts the police, it corrupts the courts, it makes more concentrated forms of whatever it is that you’re trying to prohibit, whether it is alcohol or marijuana or any other drug. And they explained, Stephen Lard did everything right.

He served his country in the marines for over 16 years, including tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s devoted to his two daughters, has been saving to buy a house where they can live with him. But his plans came crashing down in the winter of 2021, when the highway patrol seized his life savings. The officers knew they had no evidence of any crime, but they took his money anyway and gave it to the US DEA in anticipation that they would kick it back to them.

This reminds me of Lysander Spooner, who he was around the time of the American Civil War. Interesting character in many different ways. He went into competition with the post office, and he was so affected in terms of competing with the post office, which is jacking up prices very rapidly, that they had to pass a law to prohibit private people from carrying mail. To stop Lysander Spooner from essentially putting the post office out of business in his area.

But he was also a hardcore abolitionist. But after what Lincoln did and after Lincoln invaded the south and all the rest of this stuff, he said he opposed the civil war. So he’s right about a lot of things. He was a hardcore atheist, however, but in terms of the political issues, he was spot on. One of the things that he said, he said the difference between government and a highway robber is that highway robber will steal your cash and leave you on the side of the road and the government will steal your cash and then follow you down the road, nagging you about it.

But this guy, after they took all of his cash, he couldn’t go anywhere. He was basically stuck. So I say that that was something that came up. And then I also got this letter, and this is from John, a listener. He said, I listen to you often support what you do by buying gold and silver in your name. Through Tony, you state often how the bigger fight is local.

And to support the sheriffs that are more accountable to us, I’ve attached a letter from 3086 sheriffs that are part of the National Sheriff association, which is representative of all but a handful of sheriffs in the US. And they sent this letter to Ipatch, John McCain, Dan Crenshaw, in other words, and telling him not to support this law, hR 1525, which would aim to curtail some of the authority that the government pretends they have in civil asset forfeiture.

In other words, the supposed law enforcement of the people wish to continue to steal from the people and have no accountability for it. He says, if you already address this and I missed it, I appreciate it. Well, again, that is the majority opinion. And I just have to say, as I said before, just having local political officials doesn’t mean that they’re any better than the federal people. It just means that you have more input into the process.

Right. Rather than being one out of 750,000 people to vote for a congressional representative, or instead of being one out of 330 or whatever million people to vote for president, you’re going to be one out of 10,000 or something to vote for your local officials, maybe lower, depending on where you are, you might be one out of a few hundred. Whether you’re talking about a school board or you’re talking about a town council, you’re talking about the sheriff or something like that.

And so that’s my point. In terms of local, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to have honest people of good character. There may not be anybody like that. That’s running in office. But I’m just saying is that you want to focus your efforts where you’re going to have the most influence. So you can be one out of 330,000,000 votes. You can be one out of 750,000 votes, or you can be one out of a few thousand votes for a state representative or a state senator, or you might be one out of a couple of hundred votes for your local town councilor, maybe even for the sheriff, depending on the size of your county, that type of thing.

So you have an opportunity to do something right, but it doesn’t guarantee any more than carrying a gun is going to guarantee that you’re going to come out on top. The gun will maybe level things for you with somebody who’s going to attack, especially if you’re a female or you’re elderly and somebody’s coming after you that’s bigger than you physically. But if there’s no guarantee that you’re going to win, somebody can surprise attack you, somebody can start shooting first.

You may not be the only person who has a gun, so it doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to be protected, but it’s something that you do to try to protect yourself. And that’s what I talk about when I’m talking about local officials. It’s not a guarantee that you’re going to get the right thing, but it’s where you’re going to have the most effect is in participating in this locally.

And so this letter that he sent truly is disgusting coming from the national Sheriff’s Association. And again, there’s different associations. This is very big. Over 3000, almost 3100 sheriff’s associations. Constitutional sheriffs and peace officers of America. That’s sheriff Max organization and that’s much smaller. And they stress following the constitution, that type of thing. But you know, somebody could be a member of the constitutional sheriffs and peace Officers Association and they might decide that they’re not going to follow the law.

There’s no guarantee about that. But again, if you’ve got somebody who is aware of that, somebody who has said that they’re going to do that, a good starting point to take their talking points to the local sheriff and election and ask him to give his opinion about some of these questions that they have in a questionnaire for sheriff. But again, 3100 people in this national sheriff’s association. This is a letter that they wrote to Crenshaw which I guess he made public because maybe he’s trying to justify the fact that he wants to continue to steal money from people who have done nothing wrong, who’ve not been found guilty, who’ve not even been charged with a crime.

It’s called the Fair act, and nothing could be more unfair. It would largely say the sheriff’s. That would largely dismantle a crucial tool. I’m sorry, the fair act is to control. So, yeah, maybe that’s why they called it that. So it would largely dismantle a crucial tool in the fight against mexican drug cartels. And that is, they said federal civil asset forfeiture. It had anything to do with mexican drug cartels.

When you look at this, did they shut down El Chapo that way? No. And so they said the public rightly demands more federal, state and local cooperation. I don’t. I don’t want to have more consolidation of government. I want to have things decentralized. And so the people who created this government, this country, they understood the danger of consolidation, centralized control, repealing equitable sharing. That’s what we just talked about.

They steal the money from somebody, they send it to the DEA, and the DEA gives them a kickback of about 80% or whatever of it, and keeps the other part partners in crime. Repealing that, they said, will not promote civil rights. Well, that’s an absolute lie because civil rights are being violated and the constitution is being violated and their oath is being violated. They said it will not protect property owners.

Well, it will if you stop people from stealing from them. But it would be a big victory for the drug lords and for other organized crime. You see how they play this game? This is a political game. You got a criminal operation here. And don’t vote for. I’m going to be here to save you from Biden, or we’re going to steal people’s property at will to protect them from drug lords.

Government is a protection racket, and it is a racket. It really is a racket. So I said the fact finder, they go and try to make an argument for how well this works and how it is a real honest process. And so what they do is they’ll steal this stuff and then they’ll give it to a fact finder to arbitrate over this. Does that sound like what’s defined in our rule of law? Where’s the jury? Where’s the judge? None of that.

Where’s the advocate? Where are you allowed to question your accusers? Where do they charge you with a crime? Instead, they take the property, and then over a period of time, they take it to somebody they call a fact finder, not a judge or jury, the fact finder is free to decide which evidence is credible and what testimony, documents, video and other evidence add up to the greater weight in each case.

But you’re not going to have an advocate, you’re not going to have a lawyer there. It’s going to be a fact finder who’s going to go down. And guess what? They do? They rubber stamp this as well. This allows for a nuanced review of the evidence and it is fair, they said most civil proceedings, and this part is true. And this should really scare you. In defense of this government organized criminal theft they call civil asset forfeiture.

They say most civil proceedings use this standard, including ones that are used by child protective services, including those that are used for property evaluation in imminent domain. So if they want to confiscate your children or they want to take your property, you don’t get any due process with that either. So let’s just give this to the highway patrol, let them do whatever they want. And it’s also not there in tax disputes.

And of course this is a pattern of tyranny. And when they say in terms of tax disputes, this is where this all really know, the IRS, they could take your stuff. Then you have to prove that you’re innocent. Where do you prove it? Do you prove it in a real court? No, you prove it in one of their tax courts where they are the fact finder. And so this is why this is such an important thing.

I get people accuse me of being defending a sheriff. People accuse me. Had some guy accuse me a few months ago on here. Well, I’m done with you. I used to like you, but I see that you just really hate the cops. It’s like, no, I hate dishonest cops. And I don’t think dishonest cops should be protected by the system. The David Knight show is a critical thinking super spreader.

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