FBI Commits the Largest Armed Robbery in American History

in March of 2021 people entered a private security deposit box company in Beverly Hills California broke open hundreds of boxes and indiscriminately seized their contents collectively worth over $100 million box holders lost their life savings family heirlooms important documents and more but the people who took their property weren't Mobsters they were FBI agents I'm Kim Norberg of the nonprofit civil liberties Law Firm The Institute for justice joined by co-host Keith Neely today we have with us JJ attorneys Bob Beldon and Mike Greenberg they're going to share with us the story of an unprecedented FBI raid and how the institute for justice is making sure it never happens again this is beyond the [Music] brief so Bob how did all this start this all started with a company called us private vaults and that was a private uh safe deposit box company in Southern California and it was um used by a lot of people to store cash valuables that kind of thing people who value privacy now uh for example our client Linda Martin in one of our cases she used it because she looked for a box at like her bank but couldn't get one and um found us private vaults and liked that like it had the um really fancy security technology kind of like a fingerprint and ey scanner I guess and it was open 24 hours a day so um if Linda or her husband who were saving money if they needed it they could always go uh and they also like that it was kind of far across town they wanted to be able to get it if they needed it in a pinch but it was far enough away that like they couldn't just go and grab money all the time and Linda was worried if she had a debit card uh she'd just spend at all um and you know sometimes when you're dealing with people storing cash like in a safe deposit box you have to fight this urge that it's odd because um some people find it hard to understand and we kind of fight against that current in this case because a number of the people who were using uh safe deposit boxes at us private vaults were thought by law enforcement to be involved in criminal activity as was us private vaults itself uh unbeknownst to Linda and our other clients that we're going to talk about us private vaults was being investigated for fraud and sort of financial related crimes and um while uh we were or sorry sorry while uh Linda and her husband were looking for a place to store their money uh they had no idea that one day the FBI would uh come to perform a raid at us private vaults which it did in early 2021 well let's let's pause there for a moment so the FBI thinks that there's something fishy going on at us private vaults what do they do next they want to search the place do they apply for a warrant how did they do it what what happened how did we get from hey this is suspicious to okay let's storm the place yeah so I might have to let uh my colleague Mike kenberg here jump in uh because I think he's a little more familiar with the warrant but I am comfortable saying they overstate that's exactly right the FBI applied for a warrant to search and see the premises the business of us private vaults it wanted to shut the business down on the theory that the the business itself was engaging in fraud or other criminal activity uh and so it applied to search and sees the business's property and that included the nest of the safe deposit boxes uh that or the housed the safe deposit boxes uh it did not include a request to search or seize the cont of the boxes itself and for good reason the FBI didn't have any probable cause to suspect that any of the Box owners themselves had engaged in criminal activity or uh what they had done wrong and so there's this kind of tension in the warrant application where the FBI is going to seize all of the business's property uh and then the boxes are just going to be left behind and so there's this problem they have where they have to tell the magistrate uh we are necessarily going to come into contact with these boxes but we don't have any probable cause to believe that any of the owners have done anything wrong so what we are going to do is we are going to only open the boxes as far as is necessary to identify the owners and return their property to them uh if we need to open the box in order to identify the owner we will simply inventory all of the property to make sure that we are not liable for claims of lost or stolen property or anything like that uh and then um they just simply would not search or seize the Box's property or the Box owner's property for a criminal search so that's what the FBI said what actually happened on the day of the raid because I understand that what the FBI promised and what the FBI delivered were two very different things absolutely right uh over the course of four days uh a a swarm of FBI agents Agents from two other federal agencies and from all sorts of local law enforcement agencies as well break open every single box at us private vaults and for the a overwhelming number of boxes that was entirely unnecessary to begin with because us private vaults instructed its customers to uh tape an emergency contact form onto the top of the box for precisely a situation like this where you have to get in touch with the Box owner or their emergency contact in order to identify them so for the vast majority of boxes there's no need to open the box at all the FBI blows right past those emergency contact forms and for every single box over the course of 4 days it breaks every single Box open and it doesn't stop when it can identify the Box owner from the contents of the box it goes through every single item in there it holds them up to video cameras it holds them up to photo cameras and creates these records of everything that is going on in the boxes uh and these are incredibly personal things that are in the boxes there are things from cryptocurrency passwords to uh the cremated remains of someone's relative um the FBI creates records of all of those um and as for um cash anytime it finds Cash In A Box it runs that cash through a drug sniffing dog how that helps you identify the Box owner is still a mystery to me um and as far as it is actually inventorying the y inside of those boxes the records it created are useless uh anytime it found Cash In A Box the FBI was not documenting how much cash it was they just simply wrote on their forms US currency uh for things like jewelry and uh coins like gold and silver they would simply write miscellaneous coins or assorted jewelry some of these entries are as vague as assorted General items and things like that so everything that the FBI said in the warrant it was going to do like create an inventory if it needed to it didn't do and everything it said it was not going to do like conduct a criminal search or gather information for possible crimes uh it did do like running cash past drug sniffing dogs and you know they ultimately took a bunch of this cash also but what are we talking in terms of numbers here how many boxes how you know how many dollars worth of of property in total there were over 700 boxes at us private vaults uh and as we'll get into in a minute the FBI eventually permanently or tried to permanently take up to $80 million in cash and well more than that in jewelry and coins and other valuables uh it was a lot of property this was as as we like to say at I this was the largest armed robbery in American history uh and the perpetrators were the FBI well it it it strikes me two two big themes come out of that at least for me as as kind of a a lay Observer one is okay you have the FBI who's now exceeded the scope of its warrant requirement that's a huge issue right the second and and this is relatedly is is how systematic it was because we're talking about drug sniffing dogs we're talking about you know these different processes that the FBI filed I understand uh or excuse me followed I I understand that there were supplemental search instructions that were part of this case how did the FBI try to to you know systematize this I guess is is what I'm getting at well I think I think Mike has talked about it a little bit already the instructions about you know when you open a container I mean take a step back and I think Mike makes the point already but what's the safest way to make sure the contents of a sealed container don't get out you know just leave it sealed wait don't open it just wait till you know who you're going to be investigating us private vaults just leave it and until you know who it belongs to um they didn't decide to do that and instead they they systematized the steps that they would take after they cracked it open and that includes organizing in advance to make sure that the drug sniffing dogs were there uh and preparing supplemental instructions that kind of supplemented the normal inventory search and I think that when you take that kind of um fourthought and are looking sort of with knowledge that you're going to be going in and conducting a criminal search uh it takes it sort of out of the realm of other cases where we are currently litigating that involve forfeiture which um typically involve law enforcement you know reacting to some sort of uh percipient action whether it's a traffic stop or uh an arrest and making a determination that certain Pro property is subject to forfeiture kind of on the Fly um the uh case with Steven Lara is a great example anybody who has seen the case video can see the Nevada Highway Patrol officer sort of working through things in their mind like can we take it for this I don't know can we do it for this um when you lay out instructions in advance for your uh officers and your agents you can kind of know oh okay this stuff will be subject to forfeiture this stuff won't and I know that we are talking about forfeiture kind of a lot and I'm sorry to our viewers I'm sure many of them know what forfeiture is but for those that don't um it is a legal Doctrine in the United States which like most good legal doctrin started with the Pirates and uh it basically allows the government to pretend like um property is guilty of a crime and to take it without actually proving any individual including potentially an innocent owner of the property committed a crime and what we'll be talking about today um are kind of two variants of forfeiture at the federal level their civil forfeiture which is um even though it doesn't have the kind of trappings of criminal law you'd expect like Beyond A Reasonable Doubt um uh the right to like cross-examine Witnesses and you know that kind of a thing um you get a judge and uh at some point the government has to produce evidence uh presumably of something we don't like that we don't like civil forfeiture because of the innocent owner and like various other issues with it but it is world's better than the other thing we'll be talking about which is Administrative forfeiture which is something that um the good Folks at the FBI uh or ATF or any other Federal agency that's involved in law enforcement can do inhouse and um those processes are uh totally unreviewable uh at the judicial in in the judicial world and have no standards so you're basically at the whim of the agency they get to tell you what they want to tell you about the forfeiture they get to decide when they want to decide and they get to decide how they want to decide so um we have taken to administrative uh taking a call in administrative forfeiture sometimes take now explain never forfeiture because you can be in it for years and never know how you got there or why you're losing so in news of of that first case first broke the FBI portrayed it as sort of a a major victory against you know organized crime and and things like that how did that play into how we had to talk about the case after so when this news story broke and and and all the Box holders are finding out about this through the news um they're seeing images of the raid on TV and being covered in the Los Angeles Times uh and a lot of the media is taking what the FBI is saying kind of at Faceook value that they took down this business that was uh helping shelter organized crime that all the Box holders were um using this kind of very private uh high-tech secure business for uh their drug related crimes or money laundering crimes uh and it was really scary for all the Box holders that uh like our clients who were totally innocent of having done anything wrong um a lot of the early cases that were filed were uh one-off cases people who were filing uh cases in the name of John Doe they were terrified of uh going up against the FBI and its narrative uh all they wanted to do was just get their property back that had been seized as quickly as possible uh and it was really difficult uh to find clients who are willing to stand up to the FBI and say no I'm innocent and I'm going to put my name in my face out there so the real story about what's going on here can be told um we at interviewed a lot of people that that um that were scared of that um and it was not until we interviewed our our fantastic clients Paul and Jennifer sniko uh that they kind of broke the dam and said I'm willing to stand up for what is right I'm willing to put my name in my face out there and say no the FBI is wrong uh and that allowed other clients to join them their bravery um and it allowed us to file this case as a class action on behalf of every uh box holder whose whose property had been wrongly searched and seized is this a tactic that that you find the FBI engages in often as in using civil forfeiture and and trying to use perhaps the stigma of perceived connections to criminal activity to intimidate people into silence and and not stand up and challenge them when they do things like this yeah and uh more than that I mean when you um when you get involved in forfeiture the way it basically starts and I think we'll talk about this in connection with one of our cases but you get a notice uh from the federal government that says hey we have your property why don't why don't you tell us how you want to get it back is it yours why don't you prove it you subject yourself I mean anything you submit in response has to be submitted under penalty of perjury and anything you give them can be used not only to justify the forfeiture of the property they already have but to justify further criminal investigation of you and further forfeiture of further property belonging potentially to you and to others so um it is quite the cudgel uh for the federal government so as the case progressed it turns out that what the FBI did was even worse than we thought that it had been at first can you talk about that a little yeah so uh Mike and the other folks on the the first case team did a great job holding the government's feed to the fire and Discovery like we normally do and they got a bunch of evidence that showed that I can't remember if it was before the government applied for the warrant but it was definitely before the raid uh the government had made the determination and it might have been in the supplemental instructions but it had made the determination that any box with more than $5,000 cash was going to be forfeited and it didn't you know obviously at that time know who owned the box so it couldn't you know I mean just as a matter of logic could not have suspected that person reasonably of criminal activity um and thus could not have had any sort of basis for seeking a warrant to take that money right but it had already made the determination that the money was subject to forfeiture which I think as I mentioned before requires proof that the property is connected to a crime so they were basically saying you know if we see money we're going to take it we don't know who it belongs to we have no idea if they've done anything or not we're just going to take everything we see figure it out later exactly and so as the case is progressing and sort of more clients and more people are learning about this uh Mass seizure sort of every day as Mike mentioned it was on the news our client Linda Martin um learned about it on the news she shouted at her husband Reggie that's us that's our place um but uh as more people are learning uh about what happened we uh got in touch with the lead plff in our second case that came out of this um this raid and her name is Linda Martin I've mentioned her a couple times already but uh she and her husband Reggie uh live in Southern California and had been working uh like in 2019 to 2021 time frame they had met and were saving up money to buy a house in Southern California and they were like living rentree with one of their family members and just saving a bunch of cash and somebody was like Hey you know not a good idea to have a bunch of cash just sitting here why don't you put it away and so they started looking as I mentioned for uh boxes at their local bank but they weren't available so they wound up at us private vaults they save up over the the course of two years a little bit more than $40,000 to to buy a home and so I know um interest rates have gone up a lot uh since 2019 and 2021 but at the time that you know 2.75% interest rate they were going to make a down payment on a house but um they found out watching the news that the FBI had taken their money did you know I represents Ordinary People free of charge as they fight back against government abuse if you're looking for a rewarding way to support our work consider becoming a member of our merry band of monthly donors and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with 's clients every month of the year monthly donations are convenient and cost-efficient meaning more of your money goes directly to our fight for freedom and Justice sign up to donate today at .org monthly just to jump in there really quick it's got to be insane to just be watching the news and see oh our entire life savings everything we had been saving for this house is is gone right like that's just got to be such a surreal experience and it's like that just feels gross but it surely it's also unconstitutional right like that there's got to be a constitutional problem with that what's the sort of legal issue there yeah so the legal issue is that um after they learned about the seizure and they got actual notice so they they ran down to us private vaults and confirmed that the money had been taken because it was surreal they wanted to make sure it was actually happening what happened next was they got a notice from the FBI that is basically you know you can think of due process in the United States right that principle at its core says everybody who's sort of at Jeopardy of losing life liberty property you get notice and a meaningful opportunity to defend yourself when the FBI took Linda money we've already talked about they knew she had more than $5,000 that was it so they took her money they sent her a notice that was supposed to tell her hey here's why we took the money this is the federal crime that we think was committed here are the facts that connect you to that federal crime and sort of give rise to our uh belief that this property is subject to forfeiture but what the FBI does instead is through a sort of um cut paste process sends out essentially template notices that say we have your property it was taken on this day from this place essentially because somebody committed one of hundreds of different and widely variable federal crimes so you're basically left in the dark and said pick how you want to try to get your money back and so we filed a lawsuit um on behalf of Linda and everybody Nationwide who has received one of these notices from the FBI let's take a a step back to that notice real quick so when someone gets a notice like that and they're told we took your property you could have committed any one of hundreds of federal crimes what are their options to proceed what decision are they making at that point when they get the notice yeah so at that moment they have to decide between submitting a claim which init initiates the Civil forfeiture process uh in federal court or submitting a petition for remission which goes to the A agency in this case the FBI and it is not um the sort of core of our claim in the second case but there's definitely um an element of due process that is influenced by the fact that the notices description of those two options is extremely confusing and uh in my view designed to lean towards the petition and that is critically bad for innocent Property Owners because as I mentioned before the administrative forfeiture process if you go into it you're locked in it's an unreviewable process you can get to the end and ask a court to look at whether or not you physically received a notice and knew the FBI had something that belonged to you but other than that you can't get a review at all you don't have a timeline for a decision and there's no way to know that any of the evidence that you might submit is actually going to be considered uh in returning your property and and isn't by you know submitting a petition for a mission isn't the property owner effectively conceding that the FBI has the right to take the property they're kind of saying hey can you please give this back to me pretty please yeah that's right that is I'm glad you mentioned that because that is sort of the worst thing about it it's a yeah you guys can keep it but please give it back to me and you know do me a favor and give me back the stuff that's now yours right and that's um you know when you say it like that it seems ridiculous that you would ever choose it but this notice form is about I think it's about two and a quarter pages and that remission section is the only one that talks about getting your property back when you read the bullet points about filing a claim and going into civil forfeiture it's like I've got to get a lawyer I got to go to Federal Court there's going to be a us attorney involved sounds like a pretty burdensome process just to show up and say like hey I you guys got my money and I don't know how it happened or why but could I have it back which is you know incidentally something I know Linda tried to do like you know just informally contacted them like hey I think you've made a big mistake and they say oh yeah well we'll get to you we'll work on it and they sort of never do surprising um so crazily that's not where this ends right there there's another case because the FBI then loses or damages or something a bunch of stuff so what happens to kind of all of this property once the FBI takes it so once the FBI takes it they as Bob said send out this Omnibus forfeiture notice where anything that's worth more than $5,000 that they kept track of they were trying to Forfeit the problem is as we were talking about earlier their inventory procedures were so convoluted and uh not quite all that good at at documenting exactly what they were taking or or what they were inventorying that naturally over the course of four days and 700 boxes some of this property is going to go missing as you combine all that together uh and that's what happened to two of our clients in a third case um Jenny Pearson's uh and her husband had a box at us private Vault where they kept both silver coins and about $2,000 in cash uh and after we thwarted the FBI's forfeiture plans for their silver coins uh Jenny said well where's the cash as well and they said oh well we don't know any cash there was no cash in the box at all um and so they're just basically pretending that Jenny never had any cash at all they never wrote down on their thing you know random bundle of cash so that's just gone exactly right uh and in another client's case a guy named D Mayan um he had thousands of dollars of valuable coins as his retirement nest egg in his box uh and those coins have gone totally missing as well it's it's astounding that after four days and going through all these boxes that these um pieces of valuable property are just gone uh when in both of their cases there was no need to open the box in the first place because both of them had their emergency contact information on the top uh in that third case we are now suing for the FBI to compensate them for the property that they lost which is what they told the magistrate they were going to do in the first place uh and was the entire reason for the inventory so how does how does that work in in practice right the you know the box owner is saying hey I had you know 50 something coins and $2,000 and whatever and the FBI is saying we didn't write it down on our piece of paper how does this just come down to a you know ordinary American says X the entire FBI establishment says why I wonder who is going to tip the SC right like how do how do you kind of tease out what was actually in there how does that work in court well for Jenny's purposes at least she had photographs from just before the raid actually showing that there was Cash In The Box uh and so I think that's going to help a good deal um in her case as for um everything else I think it's the case that there's a lot of he said she said cases in the American justice system every day uh the courts are going to have to weigh the testimony and the evidence as to who they find credible uh given that in our first case uh the FBI has already been documented as being on record as having misled the magistrate in uh applying for the warrant uh and and concealing their plans from him for for all this forfeiture activity I'd like to think that the courts are not going to look too kindly on on the FBI's uh he said in this case uh but I suppose that we'll have to see to find out so what's the current status of all of these different cases so as for the first case the first case is over the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled resoundingly that the FBI violated the fourth amendment in conducting the raid the search and seizure at us private Vault uh a three judge panel agreed that uh the search could not be justified under the inventory exception to the warrant requirement because the FBI didn't use a use or make a useful didn't make a real inventory didn't make an inventory at all and in fact the fact that they used those special procedures that were not the FBI's ordinary inventory procedures uh was one of the deciding factors in that um a majority of the Court also found that the FBI violated the terms of the warrant uh by uh concealing their forfeiture plans from the magistrate uh and by not saying that they had uh made these special instructions and by conducting a criminal search or seizure uh which was plainly forbidden by the warrant the fact that they ran all the cash by the drug sniffing dogs is only explained uh by the fact that they wanted to criminally searched that property um and the fact that they had before the raid before submitting the warrant had already planned to Forfeit everything worth $55,000 or more uh and did not disclose that to the magistrate uh was frankly something that the warrant almost certainly would not have issued if the magistrate knew about that um and one other note if I may on the on the $5,000 points some listeners may be wondering uh why $5,000 uh as the FBI explained to us in Discovery uh that is the minimum monetary threshold that they've established that would ensure that they get money on the deal that's how much it costs them on average to kind of go through the forfeiture process do all the paperwork all of that sort of thing um and so if it was under $5,000 and they weren't going to get uh a net proceed out of it they weren't interested above $5,000 and they were uh so that's where the first case is at then the uh the second one on behalf of lend we brought it uh the first one's in federal court in Southern California or well that's where it started um we brought Linda's case here in the district of Colombia and we did that because this is where the FBI is but um the district court for the uh District of Colombia granted the government's motion to dismiss which is basically like even if uh even if everything you say is true so what uh I heard that articulation on advisory opinions the other day and I thought it was pretty good um so the uh trial court granted that motion but what it did so it ignored um one thing from the first case that we relied on pretty heavily which was uh the first Court granted a preliminary injunction against the FBI forfeiting uh our client's property because the notices appeared to be uh deficient under due process and that's you know basically the claim we brought uh on behalf of Linda in a nationwide class when the court dismissed our claims it didn't consider that order or any of the cases that that order relied on so what we're doing now um is appealing the case to the DC circuit uh court of appeals and um I think that is where the case stands but I mean happily sort of as a a human matter you know Linda and Reggie have their money back it sort of um it's good for them but it also so highlights you know the pernicious nature of the game uh that law enforcement often plays it to give you a rough sense of the timeline they take Linda and Reggie's money in March of 2021 they held it for over two years before giving it back but they gave it back about a month after we filed our lawsuit saying that they had violated the uh violated due process in the way that they perform this function on a nationwide basis so it's sort of you know we felt like it confirmed that had touched on um a touchy subject but uh they gave the money back so Linda has it but we are uh continuing to appeal for her and for uh the absent class members and in fact in giving the money back the FBI tried to use that to argue that Linda's case was mooded right right yeah which is basically I mean folks probably know what that means from Context but if you're playing keep away and someone sues you to get it back and you give it back there's you'd like to think there's nothing more for the court to do but um there is a Doctrine uh I think it's called voluntary cessation um government's not allowed to do that with people when it's you know taking property gaming the system right yeah absolutely it's um you're caught with your hand in the cookie jar and you want to avoid responsibility and you know it is um it's an oddly sort of calculated decision Mike makes the point about the $5,000 threshold much of this is how much can we how much can we add to our coffers and how much delay is this going to be and it's like you get sued in a nationwide class action and your first impulse give the money back just give the $40,000 back yeah so so how is this raid sort of different from a typ typical forfeiture case you mentioned Steven Lara and you know somebody like him is kind of more what we're used to to seeing in sort of the Civil forfeiture context so can you kind of do a bit more of comparing and contrasting yeah I I mean this is as far as I'm aware um at least in my time at I the only case I know of where somebody had sort of entered into a commercial transaction to store things in this manner um and that itself was used as evidence uh to to give rise to an attempted forfeiture and so it is um different from the cases we normally see where you know somebody is just just driving and they get pulled over and unbeknownst to them they're violating some sort of traffic law and you know you're Off to the Races or they lend their property to somebody else and it gets taken in when that person's arrested those things like I mentioned they sort of happen when you're you know you don't really know um how they occur in the moment but like you understand you gave your car to your cousin and now the car has been taken right you gave l Linda for example gave her money to a company after you know signing papers and you know thinking that that company had property rights and all of the sudden her money was gone and so it is different but I think it's a logical extension from the government's point of view of the permissive hand that they've had in much uh a forfeiture world over the past couple decades well and let's talk about the government side of that because you mentioned in sort of Steven Larry's case the the police officer kind of trying to walk through you know I see this cach here how do I take it and he's sort of creating that um framework kind of on the fly in the moment and that's generally how this sort of thing works in in our experience but that's not what happened here right right right yeah I mean it's it uh it reveals kind of the I think the thin veneer that is the idea that forfeited property is actually connected to a crime if you can set out on the front end you're the law enforcement officer you set out on the front end to just take property uh based on its value and its location somewhere you know you're not getting there and actually using your law enforcement discretion or skill to observe is this the you know the drug Lord's private jet or is it the single mom's car that's something you can do in person but if you show up and you've got instructions from the the brass take everything over $5,000 you're not really investigating or enforcing you're sort of processing a property transfer and it's divorced from the idea of law enforcement in my view so clearly the FBI engaged in a wide array of wrongdoing in this case we filed now three lawsuits who knows how many more are to come down the line what's the goal here what are we trying to accomplish in suing the FBI about the uspv seizure about ongoing retention of the property about the notices that it's giving what what's our goal so uh in the notice case our goal is to force the FBI either to cure the notices that it has sent to everyone in the country over the past five years or return the property so it's you know this system has brought the federal government like over $1.1 billion from 2017 to 2021 and we want to throw a gum in the works for the FBI and say you need to State the specific facts and the specific law that underly your taking of this person's property or you need to give it back and we think that we we think given our experience in US private vaults that they very likely cannot do uh the former and so we want to stop the administrative forfeitures that are happening there now until these notice issues are cured and as for the actual raid side of things you the nin circuit gave uh what the Wall Street Journal called a spanking to the FBI and we hope that that judicial spanking uh yield some contemplation on the part of the FBI or from doj uh to the people who who green lit this raid from the outset uh and certainly we hope that the nin circuit's opinion is a cautionary tale to any agent that would uh dream up this kind of widespread systematized theft of people's property to never do it again because you're gonna get judicially spanked is it fair enough to say that this was sort of a I don't necessarily want to say that it was like a a novel or experimental procedure on the part of the FBI but is it is it fair enough to say that if they had gotten away with it they would have done it again and the fact that we filed these cases and you know gotten these victories so far and all of that does that sort of change how they think about this at all and kind of discourage them from ripping people off on a grand scale and you know running away I certainly hope so um I I certainly think that if they had gotten away with it then they would do it again because why not do things that if there are no consequences for for doing them um it's a it's a plus for us that after oral argument at the ninth circuit in the first case um the government got such a berating from the three judges on that panel that after oral argument but before the opinion issued the government fully conceded that we should win the court should enter all the relief that we were seeking uh we think that's a a win in and of itself that there's some contemplation on the part of the government um and and we certainly hope that the opinion that eventually did Issue um is a is a Telltale sign the nin circuit's opinion compared the FBI's practices to the rits of assistance that sparked the American Revolution uh if if if that's not a warning sign then I I certainly don't know what might be so just to wrap things up what's sort of the you know long-term Vision here are we and how close are we to achieving that Vision are we just trying to get rid of civil forfeiture across the board you know how do we get there I think that's certainly one of the end goals I think that uh we are trying to attack civil forfeiture from Every Which angle that we can um uh the notice case that Bob is spearheading um is is is one such example uh there was a recent case at the US Supreme Court in which uh two of the justices uh heavily suggested that they are interested in um curtailing the the profit motive that is in inherent in civil forfeiture uh the ultimate end goal is to end civil forfeiture and replace it with only criminal forfeiture that is forfeiture that you must be convicted of a crime in order for your property to be taken permanently uh until then we're going to keep attacking civil forfeiture from Every Which angle we can until we can get to that goal thanks again for watching today's episode we got a lot of great comments on our episode about bons and qualified immunity so let's take a look at a few at Jeremy writes anyone that takes an oath to the Constitution should be liable for violating it that's absolutely right Jeremy that's why we at IG have launched our project on immunity and accountability if everyday citizens are expected to follow the law government officials should follow the Constitution at franus rights can any judges be sued for willfully misinterpreting laws in Supreme Court decisions judges can't be sued for misinterpreting the law but their decisions can be appealed to a higher court if one exists the challenge is that some courts like the United States Supreme Court have what's called discretionary jurisdiction that means they get to pick and choose the cases they hear because those courts he a limited number of cases they can't correct every legal error that a lower court judge commits that's why we at IJ try to bring multiple cases about the important issues no lawyer can win every case but we found that lawyers who patiently persistently and persuasively argue for the right interpretation of the law will eventually win and make the world a little better Robin cross writes what is a cause of action well great question Robin a cause of action is a legal term of art that essentially means the right to sue someone for relief in court usually for money damages the Supreme Court has held that the right to sue someone is separate and distinct from the substantive right itself somewhat paradoxically this has led courts in some cases to conclude that a person's constitutional rights were violated but that no cause of action existed that would allow them to sue in court and obtain a remedy we think that's wrong as Chief Justice John Marshall famously observed over two centuries ago where there is a legal right there must be a legal remedy otherwise our rights become unenforcable paper Promises at druber writes so what really were the consequences for Heather personally in this suit she's still an officer so she didn't lose her job and the taxpayers paid the victim $185,000 that's my issue when you sue anyone in government local state or federal the taxpayers end up having to pay for the official's wrongdoing hence why they continue to violate the rights of the people your spot on Drew in a world where doctrines like qualified immunity protect government officials when they blatantly violate people's constitutional rights there is little incentive for government to start acting better officers like Heather wer continue to remain employed and they often continue to violate people's rights the only way that will change is if the Law changes Congress has the power to do that and we're constantly bringing new legal challenges in the hopes that the Supreme Court will start to curtail these government-friendly doctrines but change can also happen at the state and local level to that end j has launched Americans against qualified immunity aaqi connects Grassroots activists with resources and opportunities to contact their elected representatives to encourage them to pass reform at the state and local level we've also created model legislation that states and cities can use to open their Courthouse doors to victims of government abuse and allow them to hold officials accountable if that sounds interesting to you check out our website at AA qi. org thanks again for watching and make sure and tune in to our next episode

Channel: Institute for Justice

Views: 563,667

Keywords: IJ, Institute for Justice, Freedom, Liberty, Individual Rights, Constitution, Constitutional Law, Unconstitutional Law, Con Law, Constitutional Litigation

Id: FVcE3IzK4TA

Length: 44min 20sec (2660 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 27 2024