John Sinclair: War and memory: Police and prosecutors' abuse of asset forfeiture laws criticized

[marmar]

from the Detroit Metro Times:




War and memory
Police and prosecutors' abuse of asset forfeiture laws criticized

By John Sinclair
Published: August 3, 2011


When I was coming up in Flint at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the '60s, I used to hang out at the legendary Sweetie's Barbershop in the city's north end. There my close pal Charles Leonard Boatwright Jr. — better known as Junebug — would be doing hair in the style then known as "fried, dyed and laid to the side."

I used to sit nodding out in a chair in the back, digging Gene Ammons 45s on the jukebox and listening to the cats talk, paying special attention when they would refer to some of the many, many things that were then well beyond my personal knowledge or experience.

What would really make my ears perk up was when someone's name would come up and one cat would say, "Oh, man, I been knowing him for 40 years." This was inconceivable to me: I was just 20 myself, and this figure represented twice my lifetime. It seemed impossibly far off, but now 50 years have passed and I say it all the time, especially this year, when I find myself celebrating the 40th anniversary of my release from prison and cringing at the 40th birthday of the War on Drugs.

A story I read recently in the Drug War Chronicle took me back over those same 40 years to a law enforcement atrocity in Michigan that's been all but forgotten in the dreadful annals of the War on Drugs: the felony prosecution of a guy named Richard Songer for holding the Goose Lake rock festival on his property outside of Jackson in the summer of 1970. Police and prosecutors claimed the venue was meant to be a place where drugs could be sold and distributed. ............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://metrotimes.com/mmj/war-and-memory-1.1183478

[Lance_Boyle]

1. I don't have much of a problem with asset forfeiture *post conviction*

if use of the property (or its acquisition) can be tied to the illegal activity for which one is convicted. And there needs to be some reasonable link between the asset value and the crime. Seizing a car for finding a roach in the ashtray is ridiculous, but seizing a car that is proven to have been used for kidnapping or murder may be more reasonable. But allowing it before there's even a trial is simply unAmerican. I don't understand how that was ever allowed to happen, or how it is allowed to continue happening. Except that "our betters" in blue seem to like the free money.