Kansas Police Seized Her Truck. It Took Her 8 Months To Get it Back, Despite Never Being Charged With a Crime.
Dewonna Goodridge, a 57-year-old Junction City resident, says she worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week as a machine operator to save up money for her 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe.Â
All it took for Kansas law enforcement to take it from her last June was a traffic stop that didn’t involve her and an evidence-free claim that there were marijuana crumbs in the center console of her truck.
Goodridge fought for over eight months to get her truck back. Prosecutors in Geary County, Kansas, agreed earlier this month to return it after Goodrich challenged the seizure with help from the Kansas Institute for Justice and the law firm of Joseph, Hollander & Craft.
“I just didn’t think it was fair because I worked really hard to get this vehicle,” she says. “They knew when they ran the plates that everything came back to me, and I just couldn’t understand. I couldn’t let them take my truck like that.”
Goodridge’s case is an example of the poor protections for innocent owners in civil forfeiture proceedings, and it comes at the same time that Kansas lawmakers are working on significant reforms to the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws because of stories like hers.
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never charged with a crime, and even in cases where there is no physical evidence a crime occurred.
Law enforcement groups say civil asset forfeiture allows them to disrupt organized crime like drug trafficking by targeting its illicit proceeds. However, a wide range of civil liberties groups argue that there are far too few protections for property owners, who often bear the burden and cost of going to court to prove their innocence.
Goodridge’s case began in June of last year, when Geary County sheriff’s deputies pulled over her son, who was driving her Tahoe, for several alleged traffic violations. (The Kansas Institute for Justice argued in a motion to suppress that the initial alleged infraction, failing to signal while exiting a roundabout, was not in fact a violation and that the rest of the ensuing traffic stop and search were illegal.)
After Goodridge’s son had been detained, Geary deputies brought in a drug-sniffing dog. According to an affidavit from one of the arresting officers, the dog alerted on Goodridge’s truck. The officer also claimed that she found “shake”—small marijuana crumbs—in the center console of the truck, although the affidavit goes on to note that “no items of evidence were collected upon completion of the search of the vehicle.”
Goodridge’s son had been driving to meet her, so she was at the scene of the traffic stop. She knew that her son was about to be arrested, but she had no idea she wouldn’t be allowed to retrieve her truck.
“They did the search,” Goodridge recalls. “[The officer] walked back to her car, got on her radio, and then she said, ‘My supervisor told me to seize the truck so you’re not going to get it back.”
In a notice of pending forfeiture filed
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