The Detroit Free Press reports:
Police seized more than $24 million in assets from Michiganders in 2013, under asset forfeiture laws. In many cases the citizens were never charged with a crime but lost their property anyway.
There's more:
Such laws are currently under attack nationwide by critics and legislators who say it is ripe for abuse. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced earlier this month that he was tightening federal forfeiture laws to stop abuses. Michigan, with its own forfeiture laws, was ranked in a 2010 national study by a private, nonprofit group as among the worst in the nation for abuse.
"It's straight up theft," said Williams' Kalamazoo attorney, Dan Grow. "The forfeiture penalty does not match the crime. It's absurd. They grow an extra plant and suddenly they're subjected to forfeiture. A lot of my practice is made up of these kinds of cases — middle-aged, middle-income people who have never been in trouble before. It's all about the money."
Police targeted Williams because he had been on the board of directors of a "compassion club" in Battle Creek, an hour away, and his name had turned up in records in a raid there, Grow said, even though he had not been involved with the club since 2011. The seizure, Grow contends, was particularly vicious.
As Murray Rothbard would say: the state is
theft.
