Where I Stand -- Mike O'Callaghan: Forfeiture fiends lose in Supreme Court then IRS strikes

FINALLY SOMEBODY stood up and said that enough's enough. It was U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas writing for a majority of the court in the forfeiture of Hosep Bajakajian's money. For far too long our U.S. government has been abusing its power to seize the property and money of people it believes are guilty of a crime. That's right, believes are guilty, because millions of dollars are taken every year from people never convicted of a crime.

Hosep Bajakajian, along with his wife and two daughters, was stopped June 9, 1994, when boarding a plane at Los Angeles International and relieved of $357,144. It was all legally acquired cash, but the Justice Department argues that the government has the power to seize and keep it, even if Bajakajian is innocent. Just during the year 1996, the U.S. Customs Service took $56 million dollars from outbound travelers.

Bajakajian's money was seized under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, because he had not properly declared the amount of cash he was carrying as is required by law. This doesn't justify the seizure and keeping of all a man's hard-earned cash after making a mistake not uncommon among foreign travelers, who have good reason not to list the cash they are carrying. Corrupt customs officials in other countries have taught them some severe lessons by taking some of the monies. Here our federal government takes it all under the guise of law enforcement.

Five years ago, we reviewed the use and abuse of the federal forfeiture laws. We zeroed in on the case of Las Vegans Billy and Karon Munnerlyn, who lost their life savings and work. They lost their charter jet airplane after becoming unwittingly involved with a man accused of transporting drug money.

Munnerlyn was never indicted, but his airplane was seized. Even a jury verdict in his favor was overruled by a federal judge. Years and thousands of dollars later, he recovered the plane.

Hundreds of forfeiture cases have gone uncontested or supported by lower courts. Last week for the first time the highest court stepped in to declare that "we now hold that a punitive forfeiture violates the excessive fines clause if it is grossly disproportional to the gravity of defendant's offense."

Thomas wrote "respondent's violation was unrelated to any other illegal activities. The money was the proceeds of legal activity and was to be used to repay a lawful debt. Whatever his other vices, respondent does not fit into the class of persons for whom the statute was principally designed: He is not a money launderer, a drug trafficker or a tax evader."

Thomas went on to point out that the actions of Bajakajian only affected the government and that was only by depriving it of information. He concluded "Comparing the gravity of respondent's crime with the $357,144 forfeiture the Government seeks, we conclude that such a forfeiture would be grossly disproportional to the gravity of his offense. It is larger than the $5,000 fine imposed by the District Court by many orders of magnitude, and it bears no articulable correlation to any injury suffered by the Government."

This action, by a slim 5-4 margin, of the Supreme Court was just and long overdue. The forfeiture law has been used and abused as a brutal weapon to collect property and money for law enforcement agencies throughout our country for too many years. Naturally the first officials to whine about the decision were from the Department of Justice which has misused it the most.

But guess what? A little guy finally received his fair share of justice only to see another out-of-control agency appear and attempt to take it away from him. Without even prior notice of an audit the IRS laid claim to $334,000 of the soon-to-be-released $357,144 because of the Supreme Court ruling.

There is little wonder that large numbers of Americans are frustrated with their government and fed up with politics. The major problem is that most of them feel unable to fight back and win and this results in even greater frustration.

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