[arcticbull]

The workaround under which civil asset forfeiture operates is that they're not charging the property owner - or the property holder - with anything. They're bringing a civil case against the property itself (jurisdiction in rem). The property itself is the defendant. [1, 2]

Which leads to some pretty hilarious case titles:

"United States v. Article Consisting of 50,000 Cardboard Boxes More or Less, Each Containing One Pair of Clacker Balls"

[edit] "South Dakota v. Fifteen Impounded Cats"

[edit] "United States v. One Solid Gold Object in Form of a Rooster"

In my opinion this tactic should be illegal.

[edit] As far as I know this only really exists in the US, and in Canadian admiralty law (so, only in the US).

[1] https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/terrorism-and-illici...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_rem_jurisdiction

[some_random]

It obviously should be illegal, it's a legal shenanigan on tier with "your honor I didn't assault that man, I was simply swinging my fists and his face got in the way"

[jjoonathan]

It's every bit as dumb as "sovereign citizens" trying to argue that they aren't subject to traffic laws because of a centuries old maritime treaty. Unfortunately, it's the people in charge slinging the dumb argument, so it flies.

[icambron]

What’s weird is that American higher courts are often quite good at eviscerating this kind of nonsense, usually by pointing out that such a “workaround” would make the constitutional amendment toothless, and it was not meant to be toothless, so the workaround is bunk.

That civil asset forfeiture has survived is simply because the courts are gutless about it.

[rland]

Huh?

There is a very long and plainly wrong string of Supreme Court decisions which stretches all the way back to the nation's founding. The courts are very good at precisely the opposite thing that you're describing.

I think most people kind of assume that the courts are this sort of shining beacon of enlightened liberal thought: they occasionally seem to have "duds" -- but those are intelligent and well reasoned duds. They're interpreting the constitution in a way some don't like, sure, but still upholding it nonetheless, right?

I mean, this thread here about civil asset forfeiture is a great example. If you ask any non-lawyer brained person whether it's wrong, they'll say, yeah, of course it's illegal for the government to just steal your shit. Why is this even a question?

Oh, but no, you see, the courts have wisely decided, using an argument that you might hear from a 5-year-old ("actually, this piece of property is actually a mystical ghost that we can treat as a people!"), that stealing your shit is, in fact, legal.

I really encourage anyone curious about this powerful and unaccountable institution to read some of the shittier Supreme Court decisions. They are often, simply put, stupid. Like, a regular non-lawyer person can read them and handily "eviscerate" their arguments.

[jjeaff]

My favorite, idiotic decision from a higher court this year was the judge that argued in her opinion that the federal government's legal authority to protect the public from infectious disease did not extend to mask requirements because the law says they can require sanitation, but wearing a mask doesn't "sanitize" anything.

Ignoring the fact that the point of a mask is to "sanitize" the germ filled air coming out of or into your mouth, the same law says "or other measures" as needed to protect the public.

It was such poor logic, especially considering the context of the original law at the time (fighting tuberculosis) and the potentially damaging aftermath of such a precedent (not hard to imagine a future, more deadly virus that some politicians decides is a political inconvenience).

[robonerd]

Governments doing stupid shit like this only encourages "sovereign citizens" to think similar word games and semantics will work for them too. They're naive of course; they seem to think the system is a machine indifferent to class or social standing, which simply isn't the case.

[whatshisface]

Class or social standing aren't the right lens for this, I don't think Warren Buffet vs. Three Dollars would fly in court.

[robonerd]

Warren Buffet could do it if he wanted, using his wealth to earn the favor of the right government officials. He could even buy himself a private police force to do the seizing. A real police force, licensed by the state but employed and paid by himself. This sort of thing is already a reality in America.

Anyway, my point is sovereign citizens seem to see the system as a machine, the function of which can be manipulated by giving it cleverly formulated inputs. They have a hacker mindset. They see lawyers and politicians doing this sort of thing all the time, and believe they can do the same if only they find the right incantation. It's as though somebody witnesses the Fonz hit a jukebox to make it work, then figure they can do the same trick if they hit that jukebox in the same way. Except it will never work for them, the jukebox only behaves that way for the Fonz.

[t-3]

Certainly some sovereign citizens see the system as a rigid machine, but many simply believe it should be and act accordingly. They are idealists, not necessarily deluded about reality or trying to hack the system (although those types definitely do exist, I won't deny that). It's almost like a way of turning your life into a demonstrative protest against the "big lie" that is the law and refusing to fall in line.

[Mountain_Skies]

It could be argued that Buffet already has such power, as there are all kinds of weirdness around the police forces belonging to the railroad industry in which he is heavily invested through BNSF. I've never heard of him abusing this power but the potential certainly is there.

[jessaustin]

That would totally fly in the courts of e.g. Judges Kaplan or Preska.

[zionic]

I'm no "sovereign citizen", and occasionally enjoy compilations on youtube of them getting owned in front of a judge (makes for a good laugh).

I do however find some sympathy with _one_ of their arguments, where they argue they never consented to be governed.

I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them. So I get where some people come from with a "naw fuck that" attitude, even if I see such resistance as futile.

Not directly sov-citizen related, but that does intersect with a broader community of people upset over how property works in the US. Namely, you don't own a damn thing. All deeds/titles are fee-simple, in that you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it. "Renters" in the colloquial sense are really renting twice, which is why "owning" is better. True ownership of property however no longer exists in the US.

Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars, where landowners are truly sovereign and the state only owns the commons. Enforcement then only exists in the commons (and optionally on property with the consent of the owner).

[DerpyBaby123]

Plato's Crito[1] deals directly with this question, after Socrates has been found guilty and sentenced to death for 'Corrupting the youth', his friends offer to help him leave the city rather than die.

To paraphrase, Socrates says "Though not explicitly, I have by my actions agreed to be ruled by the laws of Athens by carrying out my life here and not choosing to move away to somewhere with a different set of laws"

[1]http://www.columbia.edu/itc/lithum/wong/textclip.html @ [52b]

I believe Plato will say they consented to be governed by this state, not at birth, but throughout their life by choosing to stay in a place that is governed by this state and enjoying the benefits.

[somenameforme]

I think that's somewhat different because in Ancient Greece there was extreme decentralization. Cities were sovereign entities with an extreme diversity of ideological and other values. Compare Athens and Sparta, for instance. And so in this system, if one stays in a city then there is a strong argument to be made that they are implicitly supportive of the laws and rules of said area.

In modern times this isn't really the case. There tend to be immense legal restrictions on movement, let alone living + working in different areas. And the differences that do exist between even nations within the same "sphere" tend to be relatively negligible compared to, again, the sort of monumental differences you'd see just between different Greek city-states like Athens/Sparta.

[vkou]

> There tend to be immense legal restrictions on movement

There were extreme legal restrictions on movement in Ancient Greece, too. You couldn't just pack up your bags and move to Spara or Athens and become part of the citizen class.

And as a non-citizen, there were a lot of different ways that you could be abused by citizens, with little recourse.

Just because despotism and abuse was decentralized, doesn't mean that it wasn't despotism and abuse.

[DerpyBaby123]

Do "sovereign citizens" make to overcome those restrictions on movement? Is there any effort given?

[adolph]

"a place that is governed by this state"

In your belief, from what comes Plato's link between place and state? Places exist before states and often afterward. Can a state exist without place? If a place can exist without any particular state, can a person have a link to a place independent of a state?

[DerpyBaby123]

I do not know enough to answer about that question, nor to say if Plato even makes that link honestly. I think you're arguing with my summary.

Imagine if I'd edited it to read: 'choosing to stay within the bounds of the government, and enjoying the benefits'

Sovereign citizens do enjoy the benefits of the US state, do not reject them nor make strides at moving away from them (from anything I've read).

[JTbane]

>I mean when I think about it, I was born into an established system that imposed its rules on me from birth. I had no say in accepting/rejecting the rules. I'm essentially property of the state, subject to its whims with little to no hope of changing them.

Would you rather be born into a state of anarchy? I think Hobbes addressed this.

[adolph]

As a counterargument to Hobbes here is an excerpt from "The Dawn of Everything" in which Graeber and Wengrow argue that Hobbes' assertion isn't based in evidence.

https://lithub.com/the-dawn-of-everything-is-not-a-book-abou...

[Manuel_D]

Most of the anthropological evidence sides with Hobbes. The rates of violence in hunter gatherer societies is massive, with 10-15% of people dying at the hands of other humans. For the 20th century, despite two world wars, this figure was about 2%

[AnimalMuppet]

And they're right. They never (formally, explicitly) consented to the rules. But therefore... what?

They have three options. One, they can choose to live and operate under those rules. Two, they can work within the system to change the rules. Or three, they can go somewhere that has rules more to their liking. This isn't a prison; they can leave any time they choose. One could even argue that by staying in the country, they are (informally, implicitly) consenting to be governed by its rules.

But instead, they try a fourth alternative: Stay, but pretend that the rules don't apply to them because of laughably bogus legal theories. That doesn't work, no matter how many new legal theories they try, and no matter how much bogus logic and philosophizing they throw at it.

We've got a lot of non-sov-cit people who don't consent to the rules. We call them "criminals".

[everforward]

> Or three, they can go somewhere that has rules more to their liking. This isn't a prison; they can leave any time they choose.

That's an illusion of choice, though. There isn't any unclaimed, habitable land anymore. If your views don't align with any of the 195 existing countries, then this isn't actually an option. It's just 1 or 2, but in a different location.

You can't be an anarchist, ever. There's nowhere to do it. If you want to live somewhere that pledges itself as a Christian theocracy, you better hope you're Catholic. Ditto for most religions, really. Or if you want to live in a sovereign entity with the population of a small town.

The options are really just "suck it up" or "spend your whole life trying to change it". I'm genuinely curious what the sovereign citizens would do if they were allowed to secede any land they own. It's not for me, but I am curious whether they'd actually leave or if they just don't want to follow the rules.

[necovek]

While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs.

Getting a work permit in another country is usually pretty hard, for instance.

Still, even with that, I think we (as a society/civilisation) need people like that, challenging the system in all sorts of ways. And not everyone not obeying the rules is a "criminal" — none of the civil offenses qualify, for instance, even in the legal sense.

Of course, some of those "challenges", especially most of those criminal ones, should be dealt with proper "retaliation" (prison sentences, large penalties...) from the society so it's obvious which "challenges" are not welcome. But let's not forget that many of the things we take for granted today have been criminal in the not so distant past.

[vkou]

> While your three options are the three practical options, one should note that it's not trivial to move to whatever country you might want, and not just because of costs.

It's also not trivial (Next to impossible, actually) to survive alone, completely independent of society.

If you want the benefits of society, you have to abide by its rules.

[zebraflask]

A variety of protests, I'm sure, would look askance at much of this comment.

The sovereign citizen material, though, really does leave the impression that there must be something underlying the absurdity.

Mental illness? It generally comes across as the type of homegrown rant material you'd find stapled to a telephone pole.

[AnimalMuppet]

See, a protest - even civil disobedience - is working within the system to change the rules. Sovereign citizen stuff? Not so much.

[gwright]

I've wondered at times if it would make sense for there to be an explicit legal proceeding at the age of majority in which you explicitly opt in to the social contract analogous to the naturalization process when a foreigner becomes a citizen.

I get hung up on what happens if you choose not to opt-in.

[landemva]

You would still be subject to not harming others nor break a voluntary agreement/contract. People have rights, and may defend themselves.

[tarboreus]

I think if you don't think we'll have the same thing on Mars as we do on Earth, then I have some NFTs to sell you.

[robonerd]

(I'm skeptical of the very premise of colonizing Mars, but putting that aside..)

I expect what forms on Mars, at least initially, will resemble the high seas a lot more than it does any country. You'll have facilities owned and commanded by corporations operating under flags of convenience, more or less free to engage in any nastiness they like (at least until a navy or coastguard with guns shows up to enforce their will on the facility.)

[tarboreus]

Perhaps, though that seems like an unstable equilibrium. By the time we have communities up there, they're have their powerful and their not powerful, just like we terrestrials.

[the_only_law]

At this point, I’m convinced Mars is going to be some sort of neo-feudal territory.

[_jal]

> where they argue they never consented to be governed

They also never consented to birth.

They are free to renounce their citizenship, however. Nobody is forcing them to stay US citizens.

> Maybe we can experiment with better society designs on mars

Hate to break it to you, but Mars colonies (assuming they ever exist) are going to be dictatorships. Lifeboat ethics don't leave a lot of room for arguing, let alone voting.

[kaybe]

Is it really that easy for US citizens to leave? Where can you go if you have neither money nor education or skills and are older?

[fencepost]

You can leave most countries and renounce citizenship, typically with some hoops to jump through but it can be done.

The questions of where you'll go and how you'll support yourself are something that you'd best figure out before starting that process, because after you start your country of origin may well say 'not OUR problem anymore' about you.

[tempestn]

That's not really the US's fault though, right? "You're free to leave, but if you want to stay here you have to abide by our rules," sounds reasonable I think. There are countries in the world where you're not free to leave even if another country will take you, and this argument would hold a lot more water.

[t-3]

Renunciation is not free - they literally charge you for it. You also can't renounce without obtaining another citizenship, which, surprise, surprise, you generally have to buy with both time and money.

[_jal]

Free as in freedom, not beer, as they say.

But Sovereign Citizens are rugged individualists who don't need no handout, eh?

> You also can't renounce without obtaining another citizenship

That is false for US citizens. See:

https://www.usa.gov/renounce-lose-citizenship

[edgyquant]

The book Decline and Rise of Democracy goes into detail about this. Pretty much all nations that had a resource jugular (I.e. Egypt with the Nile) become extractive societies.

[landemva]

>> you merely buy and sell the right to rent that land from the government for as long as you can afford it.

You seem to be speaking of property tax on land. Did you know not all land is on county assesor tax roles? Have you researched how to find land not in the county tax catalog?

[zionic]

I’m not aware of any land/states with no property tax. Have a link?

[c22]

That's the thing, they're not really wrong, they just lack the army to back up their claims.

I do think people should be allowed to sue their parents for wrongful birth, though.

[kbelder]

>sue their parents for wrongful birth

Nah, not when there's an obvious and simple remedy.

[eternalban]

If it was simple, people would be doing it left and right. More like 'they got me hooked on heroine'.

[caffeine]

I think parents should be allowed to hit their kids for being ungrateful little runts.

[orestarod]

Moreover, parents should own their kids since they gave birth to them. They should be legally be able to take every decision for them, and be their guardian, until they die. They gave their children birth after all.

[leephillips]

I’m not impressed. It just reminds me of children who, when they reach a certain age, start whining, “Well I didn’t ask to be born.”

[robonerd]

We tell these people about "social contracts" then smirk when they raise the common sense objection of never signing such a contract in the first place.

Of course a social contract is not at all the same as a real contract, a social contract is not a document that you sign, it applies to you whether or not you ever consented to it. But when language that seems to conflate the two is used to persuade people who don't really have a firm grasp on the way the world works, it seems cruel to laugh at their confusion.

[raincom]

It is called “legal fiction”, as judges and lawyers call it among themselves.

[Mountain_Skies]

Once it was broadly accepted that the 14th amendment made corporations into people, the die was cast on the creation of these types of legalistic shenanigans.

[couchand]

I'm not sure there's legal or historical basis for that assertion?

Edit: see this comment from elsewhere in this thread with a link to a scholarly history of civil asset forfeiture: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449092

[cameldrv]

The issue is that in rem jurisdiction was originally intended and justified for cases where the owner of the property was unknown or beyond the reach of the law (say overseas.) The early cases were things like an overseas shipper not paying proper import taxes. For cases like this, in rem seems reasonable to me.

Where things went off the rails is when they started applying this to cases where the owner of the property was known, and that owner should have their normal fourth amendment rights.

[r3trohack3r]

You give the government an inch and, historically over and over again, they take a mile.

The Presidential Surveillance Program was justified using Smith v. Maryland. The argument was that, if Smith had no reasonable expectation of privacy for metadata in isolation, no aggregate of citizens had an expectation of privacy. Therefore mass surveillance of metadata is legal. You let the government see the phone records of one citizen without a warrant and decades later you have something like 33% of all email, TCP/IP, and phone metadata being collected and analyzed by a government agency without a warrant.

The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets. You let the government regulate speech that poses a clear and present danger and they use that to make it illegal to oppose a draft.

[arcticbull]

> The old saying that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply to “yelling fire in a crowded theater” was an argument a Supreme Court justice used to justify jailing a man for handing out anti-draft pamphlets.

This whole 'you can't yell fire in a crowded theater' thing is not a real thing.

Per @popehat:

5/ '"shout fire in a theater" is a rhetorical device used in 1919 to justify jailing people for writing anti-draft pamphlets in World War I. The First Amendment standard (to use the term generously) applied in that case has been dead for more than a half-century.'

6/ 'The same judge went on to smirk "three generations of imbeciles are enough" to justify forcible government sterilization of persons deemed undesirable by the state, so you know, he had a way with words.'

7/ 'So when you trot out "you can't shout fire in a theater" in response to a First Amendment question, you're using the catchphrase a eugenicist used to support jailing people for criticizing the draft in a case that hasn't been good law for a half century.' [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/1356670918706089985

[8note]

There's no modern attachment to eugenics or the draft though. A person full of bad ideas can still have a good one, and it's noticeable that his others do not persist

[vkou]

> 7/ 'So when you trot out "you can't shout fire in a theater" in response to a First Amendment question, you're using the catchphrase a eugenicist used to support jailing people for criticizing the draft in a case that hasn't been good law for a half century.' [1]

That's true, but it's also true to criticize anyone citing the constitution by pointing out that it was written by slaveowners and perpetrators of genocide.

For some reason, though, that argument never goes over well. Maybe it's because the character of the person who made an argument hundreds of years ago is only relevant when you disagree with the argument.

[Buttons840]

So the defense of violating people's right to be secure from seizurs is some mumbo jumbo about charging objects with a crime? How does charging anyone or anything relate to the 6th amendment?

[mysterydip]

People have constitutional rights, objects do not

[alistairSH]

The right of the people to be secure in their ... effects, against unreasonable ... seizures, shall not be violated

The building was part of the person's effects. I don't understand how your argument is legal (not that I don't believe you - civil forfeiture has been going on long enough that I assume SCOTUS has heard a sampling of cases).

It beggars belief that this practice has stood for decades.

[mysterydip]

I agree with you and think it's a crazy practice. I was just saying how they justify it (flaws aside)

[Buttons840]

Seizing objects violates the owners rights, not the objects rights.

Another angle of defense might be to ask if it's even possible to violate the 6th amendment. What would violating the 6th amendment look like? I suspect the answer will closely resemble civil forfeitures.

[l33t2328]

So is it even possible to violate the 6th amendment? Could the police not just seize anything since that object has no rights?

[edrxty]

And objects can't commit crimes

[netizen-936824]

It's about being used in the commission of a crime, not that the object committed the crime itself

[function_seven]

If that's the case, then what's the point in seizing it? The crime has already been committed, the pile of money being taken doesn't change that one bit.

If I use a payphone to order a hit, is it reasonable for the government to come rip it out of the ground? What if I use a freeway to smuggle drugs? Now the road must be torn out?

Money is fungible and has all sorts of uses. Any particular pile of cash is no more or less likely to be intrinsically criminal in nature. Just like phones and freeways.

[c22]

The point is to make the crime unprofitable so people will not want to do it. This is not a crazy policy assuming the crime actually happened. The ridiculous part about civil asset forfeiture is that no one has to prove a crime even occured. The onus is on the pile of money or whatever to prove its innocence.

[mcphage]

If the object didn't commit the crime, then how can you bring a court case against it?

[netizen-936824]

That's a great question. Unfortunately I don't have the answer but I believe it has something to do with civil v. criminal cases. I just know that's the line of thinking that these top legal minds are using to justify this bs

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah no guilty mind.

[pessimizer]

> People have constitutional rights, objects do not

I'm pretty sure that's been modified to US people on US soil, at least 100 miles from a border, have constitutional rights, but those rights were all intended to mean something different than what they actually say.

[mometsi]

The "defendant" arg is passed by value and can't be null.

The hack they came up with is to just disable type checking and pass in whatever object they have available.

TFA describes the inevitable runtime errors

[hn_version_0023]

This is precisely like the prohibition on “cruel AND unusual punishment” being circumvented by making cruelty usual.

I’d mourn for the US, but it seems it’s been dead & gone longer than I’ve been alive.

[R0b0t1]

I've thought about that one a lot and I think it is the real intention. The admitted purpose of punishment in the legal system is punishment, not rehabilitation. That is something that can be change, but until it is, only punishments both cruel and unusual are prohibited. Unusual but not cruel punishments allow for flexibility like forcing someone to write a paper or read a book. Other punishments, like putting someone in a cage, are necessarily cruel.

[pessimizer]

This country was founded with a workforce of slaves and indentured servants, ankle deep in the blood of natives. One might rationalize with difficulty some way to argue the US isn't racist by design because of that, but to argue that it was civil libertarian is a step too far.

The civil libertarian language comes from being heavily seeded by small Protestant cults, but not wanting to fall into European-style religious wars over it. Also, ironically, to protect the rights of a slaveholding minority.

[dimal]

How on earth is this able to stand? It’s absurd. Have challenges made it to the Supreme Court and lost?

[sandworm101]

Customs /international shipments. There is a long history of seizing illegal or suspect material at boarder crossings where the actual owner/importer is unknown or not available. A funny-named lawsuit against a box is significantly better than the alternative: zero legal process and no case recorded anywhere.

[arcticbull]

Agreed, it makes sense in some contexts. The issue with asset forfeiture is that the state pretends not to know who the owner is so they can move forward in rem.

[edit] Well, two problems: frequently the entity seizing the property gets to keep it and add it to their budget - or split the proceeds. This creates an incentive for them to move forward this way.

[R0b0t1]

It'd be better to do a John Doe case, because an item can't represent itself. A hyptothetical defndant can.

There's also the problem of you have no rights at the border anyway, even though you should.

[jazzyjackson]

> lawsuit against a box

I just can't make sense of the "vs" in the case titles, in what way is the object fighting back? Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ?

[Goronmon]

Why is there a case at all and not "here is a list of contraband seized at the border" ?

I would assume the legal procedure is what determines what actually happens to the object. Just like the police arrest people but don't sentence them or put them in prison directly.

[sandworm101]

Legal Research and Writing day one: it is never written as "vs", always "v." It is Roe v. Wade, not Roe vs. Wade.

[dimal]

That makes sense in that case, but if that’s the reason, how can that apply to situations where the ownership of the property is well understood?

[marcosdumay]

Lawyers have that habit of taking an obviously false fact and rewrite it so that you can't prove by Boolean logic using laws or prior legal decisions as premises that they are false. Instead, you have to recourse for synonyms or even to the words meaning (some times, the meaning as used, not as the dictionary says). Then they pretend the new writing is a completely different thing from the meanings it convoys, and that what they said is absolutely true, since you can't algebraically prove it's false.

That practice should be a crime, by itself.

[pmyteh]

It's common in admiralty law everywhere. If you have a ship that hasn't paid its docking fees, what can you do? The owner is an ocean away and won't come to court even if you find a way to inform them. If you let the ship sail the port will never be paid. It can be arrested and, if necessary, auctioned to pay the debt. But you can't do that without a court order. So there is an in rem action against the ship itself. It makes perfect sense in that context (and in the one that other commentators have mentioned, which is unaccompanied packages of contraband). Also prize and salvage actions, which are also admiralty proceedings.

The difficulty comes when you stretch the concept like with civil forfeiture. It's not even necessary: England and Wales has the Proceeds of Crime Act to allow seizure and forfeiture of criminal property and all the cases under that are ordinary in personam actions between the state and the putative criminal.

[account42]

> If you have a ship that hasn't paid its docking fees, what can you do?

You can sue the owner. If they don't show up that doesn't mean that they automatically win the case - if anything, it's the opposite. If you can't identify the owner you can make the case against John Doe and still have a state appointed defender represent the owner's rights. You can get a court-ordered injunction to detain the ship until the case is resolved.

I don't see why you need to invent a new legal concept here at all - other that it makes things easier for the state to seize things when they don't need to worry about such pesky things as rights.

[gwright]

Hmm. I've been wondering why all the Russian yachts have been "arrested" lately in the news as opposed to "seized", for example. It sounded very strange to me as I thought that "arrested" only applied to people.

Your use in this comment make me think that usage is tied to this legal concept of in rem.

[theptip]

I didn’t know this, thanks. This is preposterous. I was already strongly opposed to civil forfeiture but the shaky constitutional foundation makes things even worse (if that was possible).

[Sohcahtoa82]

Which just goes to show how absolutely fucking insane our court system is.

Any sane court system would believe that charging an inanimate object with a crime is beyond bonkers.

[JPKab]

The case titles are utterly hilarious, and do such a great job in highlighting the absurdity of this entire process.

[whiddershins]

Creative accounting can still be fraud.

Bringing a civil suit doesn’t change the fundamental fact of this being unreasonable seizure. It’s seizure. And it’s unreasonable.

Naming it something else or inventing a process for doing it doesn’t change reality.

[the_only_law]

> The property itself is the defendant

Hope it has a good lawyer then I guess?

[thfuran]

Hah. Boxes don't have a right to representation.

[ASalazarMX]

If only the owner was reachable to answer for the boxes instead.

[r3trohack3r]

One of my favorite (although also sad) was the time the U.S. Government sued a bunch of shark fins: United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.

[thelock85]

I'm curious to if/how this relates to corporations having free speech rights under Citizens United vs. FEC.

Property is an asset, not a corporation (though could a corp. be an asset of a holding company?) but philosophically-speaking, "property itself as a defendant" and "corporation as a legal individual" seems connected.

[scarface74]

Of course the same party who says that corporations should have “free speech rights” are the same ones that target corporations that speak out against their policies. It almost happened in GA with Delta Airlines and did happen in Florida with Disney.

In the case of Florida, if it isn’t struck down, it’s going to caused the cities in the surrounding area to have to pay higher taxes and take on Disney’s debts.

[8note]

Next we'll start charging animals of murder again. Maybe Chassenée's rats will show up for the US government to be tried