From FiftyThirtyEight’s Significant Digits, this piece of excellent news:
$60,000
Iowa will pay two Californians $60,000 after their bankroll was seized by Iowa State Patrol troopers in a warrantless search as part of an asset forfeiture. The Californians sued, and the state of Iowa not only will return the inappropriately ripped off cash but will also disband its state forfeiture team. [Iowa City Press Citizen]
I just did a search here on my own blog to find what I assumed I’d posted on this subject at least a year ago. It was a devastatingly enraging long article in the New Yorker by a terrific journalist, Sarah Stillman. It laid out in powerful individual stories the kind of wreckage this municipally-legislated theft, a/k/a “policing for profit,” does to people’s lives.
I thought I’d done a piece on it, and linked it.
I had: the piece is about a John Oliver take-down on civil forfeiture. But within my comments, I did link Sarah Stillman’s brilliant article–called “Taken”–as well as a couple of others.
Could this rotten incident in Iowa be the beginning of the end to civil forfeiture? Let’s hope. Nowadays, I’m clinging desperately to anything offering hope for the reasonable, just, fair and righteous civilization I used to believe I lived in.