Posted on 05/26/2012 4:50:30 AM PDT by marktwain
TEWKSBURY, Mass. Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: What country are we in? He and his wife Pat are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language.
This towns police department is conniving with the federal government to circumvent Massachusetts law which is less permissive than federal law in order to seize his livelihood and retirement asset. In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswells father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million.
The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the equitable sharing of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery.
Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate these 30 episodes involved less than five one-hundredths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days.
The government says the rooms were used to facilitate a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible
(Excerpt) Read more at missoulian.com ...
“What I gather from this article is that DOJ has finally figured out that the landlords do know “
Indeed? What *I* gather is that the law enforcement community wants to delegate its duties to the rest of us — at gun point.
Anyone who still says the Pledge of Allegiance is a fool.
What caught my notice in this article is the name of the place, Tewksbury.
The Graham-Tewksbury Feud, also known as the Pleasant Valley War, was the second bloodiest feud in US history, after the Hatfield-McCoy Feud. Taking place mostly in Arizona, it ended up with all combatant members of both families being killed.
Sorry, but in most cases that would be RAACISSST! DOJ won't go for it!
In all seriousness, the government can’t seize public housing because the government already owns public housing. To whom would the government forfeit its property? To itself. Sorry, but the government wants more property (and desperately needs more revenue to finance its spending habits), so only private property is in danger, not property that the government already owns.
George Will wrote this? Maybe he’s starting to get it.
“What I gather from this article is that DOJ has finally figured out that the landlords do know ~”
So, are you implying that the motel owner was in on the drug dealing, or that he somehow *should* have known what someone renting a room for a night or two was doing behind closed doors?
Should he have played the statistics an refused to rent rooms to those most likely to be drug dealers - young blacks and hispanics ?
Just refuse to rent to Amish who tell you they really like your hot tubs.
This law is so bogus. Plenty of drug deals go down on fed property, but we don’t see that going up for sale.
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