presumed guilty.txt

黑客培训教程

     They offered help, he accepted.  They asked to search his truck, he
agreed. They asked if he was carrying cash. He said he was because he was
scouting heavy equipment auctions.

     They then pulled a door panel from the truck, said the space behind it
could have hidden drugs, and seized the money and the truck, court records
show. Police did not arrest Sotello but told him he would have to go to court
to recover his property.

     Sotello sent auctioneers' receipts to police which showed that he was a
licensed buyer. The sheriff offered to settle the case, and with his legal
bills mounting after two years, Sotello accepted. In a deal cut last March, he
got his truck but only half his money. The cops kept $11,500.

     "I was more afraid of the banks than anything - that's one reason I carry
cash," says Sotello. "But a lot of places won't take checks, only cash or
cashier's cheeks for the exact amount. I never heard of anybody saying you
couldn't carry cash."

     Affidavits show the same deputy who stopped Sotello routinely stopped the
cars of black and Hispanic drivers, exacting "donations" from some.

     After another of the deputy's stops, two black men from Atlanta handed
over $1,000 for a "drug fund" after being detained for hours, according to a
handwritten receipt reviewed by The Pittsburgh Press.

     The driver got a ticket for "following to (sic) close." Back home, they
got a lawyer.

     Their attorney, in a letter to the sheriff's department, said deputies had
made the men "fear for their safety, and in direct exploitation of that fear a
purported donation of $1,000 was extracted . . . "

     If they "were kind enough to give the money to the sheriff's office," the
letter said, "then you can be kind enough to give it back." If they gave the
money "under other circumstances, then give the money back so we can avoid
litigation."

     Six days later, the sheriff's department mailed the men a $1,000 cheek.

     Last year, the 72 deputies of Jefferson Davis Parish led the state in
forfeitures, gathering $1 million- more than their colleagues in New Orleans, a
city 17 times larger than the parish.

     Like most states, Louisiana returns the money to law enforcement agencies,
but it has one of the more unusual distributions: 60 percent goes to the police
bringing a case' 20 percent to the district attorney's office prosecuting it
and 20 percent to the court fund of the judge signing the forfeiture order.

     "The highway stops aren't much different from a smash-and-grab ring,"
says Lorenzi, of the Louisiana Defense Lawyers Association.

---

PAYING FOR YOUR INNOCENCE

     The Justice Department's Terwilliger says that in some cases "dumb
judgment" may occasionally create problems, but he believes there is an
adequate solution. "That's why we have courts."

     But the notion that courts are a safeguard for citizens wrongly accused
"is way off," says Thomas Kemer, a forfeiture lawyer in Boston.  "Compared to
forfeiture, David and Goliath was a fair fight."

     Starting from the moment the government serves notice that it intends to
take an item, until any court challenge is completed, "the government gets all
the breaks," says Kemer.

     The government need only show probable cause for a seizure, a standard no
greater than what is needed to get a search warrant. The lower standard means
that the government can take a home without any more evidence than it normally
needs to take a look inside.

     Clients who challenge the government, says attorney Edward Hinson of
Charlotte, N.C., "have the choice of fighting the full resources of the U.S.
Treasury or caving in."  Barry Kolin caved in.

     Kolin watched Portland, Ore., police padlock the doors of Harvey's, his
bar and restaurant, for bookmaking on March 2.

     Earlier that day, eight police officers and Amy Holmes Hehn, the
Multnomah County deputy district attorney, had swept into the bar, shooed out
waitresses and customers and arrested Mike Kolin, Barry's brother and
bartender, on suspicion of bookmaking.

     Nothing in the police documents mentioned Barry Kolin, and so the 40-
year-old was stunned when authorities took his business, saying they believe he
knew about the betting. He denied it.

     Hehn concedes she did not have the evidence to press a criminal case
against Barry Kolin, "so we seized the business civilly."

     During a recess in a hearing on the seizure weeks later, "the deputy DA
says if I paid them $30,000 I could open up again," Kolin recalls. When the
deal dropped to $10,000, Kolin took it.

     Kolin's lawyer, Jenny Cooke, calls the seizure "extortion." She says:
"There is no difference between what the police did to Barry Kolin or what Al
Capone did in Chicago when he walked in and said, 'This is a nice little bar
and it's mine.' The only difference is today they call this civil forfeiture."

---

MINOR CRIMES, MAJOR PENALTIES

     Forfeiture's tremendous clout helps make it "one of the most effective
tools that we have," says Terwilliger.

     The clout, though, puts property owners at risk of losing more under
forfeiture than they would in a criminal case in the same circumstances.

     Criminal charges in federal and many state courts any maximum sentences.
But there's no dollar cap on forfeiture, leaving citizens open to punishment
that far exceeds the crime.

     Robert Brewer of Irwin, Idaho, is dying of prostate cancer, and uses
marijuana to ease the pain and nausea that comes with radiation treatments.

     Last Oct. 10, a dozen deputies and Idaho tax agents walked into the
Brewers' living room with guns drawn and said they had a warrant to search.

     The Brewers, Robert, 61, and Bonita, 44, both retired from the postal
service, moved from Kansas City, Mo., to the tranquil, wooded valley of Irwin
in 1989. Six months later, he was diagnosed.

     According to police reports, an informant told authorities Brewer ran a
major marijuana operation.

     The drug SWAT team found eight plants in the basement under a grow light
and a half-pound of marijuana.  The Brewers were charged with two felony
narcotics counts and two charges for failing to buy state tax stamps for the
dope.

     "I didn't like the idea of the marijuana, but it was the only thing that
controlled his pain," Mrs. Brewer says.

     The government seized the couple's five-year-old Ford van that allowed
him to lie down during his twice-a- month taps for cancer treatment at a Salt
Lake City hospital, 270 miles away.  Now they must go by car.

     "That's a long painful ride for him.  His testicles would sometimes swell
up to the size of cantaloupes, and he had to lie down because of the pain. He
needed that van, and the government took it," Mrs. Brewer says.

     "It looks like the government can punish people any way it sees fit."

     The Brewers know nothing about the informant who turned them in, but
informants play a big role in forfeiture.  Many of them are paid, targeting
property in return for a cut of anything that is taken.

     The Justice Department's asset forfeiture fund paid $24 million to
informants in 1990 and has $22 million allocated this year.

     Private citizens who snitch for a fee are everywhere. Some airline
counter clerks receive cash awards for alerting drug agents to "suspicious"
travelers.  The practice netted Melissa Funner, a Continental Airlines clerk
in Denver, at least $5,800 between 1989 and 1990, photocopies of the checks
show.

     Increased surveillance, recruitment of citizen-cops, and expansion of
forfeiture sweeps are all part of the take- now, litigate-later syndrome that
builds prosecutors' careers, says a former federal prosecutor.

     "Federal law enforcement people are the most ambitious I've ever met, and
to get ahead they need visible results. Visible results are convictions and,
now, forfeitures," says Don Lewis of Meadville, Crawford County.

     Lewis spent 17 years as a prosecutor, serving as an assistant U.S.
attorney in Tampa as recently as 1988. He became a defense lawyer - when "I
found myself tempted to do things I wouldn't have thought about doing years
ago."

     Terwilliger insists U.S. attorneys would never be evaluated on "something
as unprofessional as dollars."

     Which is not to say Justice doesn't watch the bottom line.

     Cary Copeland, director of the department's Executive Office for Asset
Forfeiture, said they tried to "squeeze the pipeline" in 1990 when the amount
forfeited lagged behind Justice's budget projections.

     He said this was done by speeding up the process, not by doing "a whole
lot of seizures."

---

ENDING THE ABUSE

     While defense lawyers talk of reforming the law, agencies that initiate
forfeitures scarcely talk at all.

     DEA headquarters makes a spectacle of busts like the seizure of
fraternity houses at the University of Virginia in March. But it refuses to
supply detailed information on the small cases that account for most of its
activity.

     Local prosecutors are just as tight-lipped.

     Thomas Corbett, U.S. Attorney for Western Pennsylvania, seals court
documents on forfeitures because "there just are some things I don't want to
publicize. The person whose assets we seize will eventually know, and who else
has to?"

     Although some investigations need to be protected, there is an
"inappropriate secrecy" spreading through the country, says Jeffrey Weiner,
president-elect of the 25,000-member National Association of Criminal Defense
Lawyers.

     "The Justice Department boasts over the few big fish they catch. But they
throw a cloak of secrecy over the information on how many innocent people are
getting swept up in the same seizure net, so no one can see the enormity of
this atrocity."

     Terwilliger says the net catches the right people: "bad guys" as he calls
them.

     But a 1990 Justice report on drug task forces in 15 states found they
stayed away from the in-depth financial investigations needed to cripple major
traffickers. Instead, "they're going for the easy stuff," says James "Chip"
Coldren Jr., executive director of the Bureau of Justice Assistance, a
research arm of the federal Justice Department.

     Lawyers who say the law needs to be changed start with the basics: The
government shouldn't be allowed to take property until after it proves the
owner guilty of a crime.

     But they go on to list other improvements, including having police abide
by their state laws, which often don't give police as much latitude as the
federal law. Now they can use federal courts to circumvent the state.

     Tracy Thomas is caught in that very bind.

     A jurisprudence version of the shell game hides roughly $13,000 taken from
Thomas, a resident of Chester, near Philadelphia.

     Thomas was visiting in his godson's home on Memorial Day, 1990, when local
police entered looking for drugs allegedly sold by the godson. They found none
and didn't file a criminal charge in the incident. But They seized $13,000 from
Thomas, who works as a $70,000-a-year engineer, says his attorney, Clinton
Johnson.

     The cash was left over from a sheriff's sale he'd attended a few days
before, court records show. The sale required cash much like the government's
own auctions.

     During a hearing over the seized money, Thomas presented a withdrawal slip
showing he'd removed money from his credit union shortly before the trip and a
receipt showing how much he had paid for the property he'd bought at the sale.
The balance was $13,000.

     On June 22, 1990, a state judge ordered Chester police to return Thomas'
cash.  They haven't.

     Just before the court order was issued, the police turned over the cash to
the DEA for processing as a federal case, forcing Thomas to fight another
level of government. Thomas now is suing the Chester police, the arresting
officer and the DEA.

     "When DEA took over that money, what they in effect told a local police
department is that it's OK to break the law," says Clinton Johnson, attorney
for Thomas.

     Police manipulate the courts not only to make it harder on owners to
recover property, but to make it easier for police to get a hefty share of any
forfeited goods. In federal court, local police are guaranteed up to 80 percent
of the take a percentage that may be more than they would receive under state
law.  Pennsylvania's leading police agency the state police and the state's
lead prosecutor - the Attorney General - bickered for two years over state
police taking cases to federal court, an arrangement that cut the Attorney
General out of the sharing.

     The two state agencies now have a written agreement on how to divvy the
take.

     The same debate is heard around the nation.

     The hallways outside Cleveland courtrooms ring with arguments over who
will get what, says Jay Milano, a Cleveland criminal defense attorney.  "It's
causing a feeding frenzy."