A Movie Mirrors the Stranger-Than-Fiction Reality of Civil Asset Forfeiture
“I need to report a crime,” Terry Richmond, the protagonist of the currently popular Netflix movie Rebel Ridge, tells Jessica Sims, a police officer in a small Louisiana town. That crime was highway robbery: the theft of $36,000 in cash. But the perpetrators were two of Sims’ own colleagues, and the cash grab was perfectly legal.
While the details of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s screenplay are fictional, the broad outlines of Richmond’s predicament are sadly familiar. The film vividly illustrates the unjust consequences of civil asset forfeiture, a system of legalized larceny that allows police to seize property that is allegedly tainted by crime.
The U.S. Supreme Court has facilitated that racket both by approving the general concept and by giving cops broad leeway to stop and search travelers. In 1996, for example, the Court ruled that the Fourth Amendment allows police to pull over a motorist whenever they have probable cause to believe he has committed a traffic violation, even if that is not the real motivation for the stop.
Richmond is stopped while biking through town on his way to post bail for a cousin who was arrested for marijuana possession. While the exact nature of Richmond’s alleged traffic violation is unclear, the cops eventually say they are letting him go with a warning.
Before that happens, however, the officers search his backpack, ostensibly for weapons, and find a bag of money—the proceeds from Richmond’s sale of his interest in a Chinese restaurant, which he says the police can verify by contacting the restaurant’s owner. Some of the money is for his cousin’s bail, he explains, while the rest is earmarked for a pickup truck he plans to buy for a boat-hauling business.
The cops nevertheless keep the cash. “We’re going to hold on to this money,” one says. “We’ve concluded from our investigation that this is drug currency.”
Richmond, who has committed no crime, is astonished by this turn of events. But as a sympathetic courthouse employee explains to him, police can seize property without accusing the owner of a crime because a civil forfeiture is notionally an action against the asset itself.
Richmond also learns that challenging a forfeiture typically costs more than the property is worth and that police departments use seizures to s
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