Source: https://schlissellaw.wordpress.com/tag/4th-amendment/
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 12:14:52+00:00

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Confiscatory Texas Town Officials Subject to RICO Prosecution?
I talking with my employer, Elliot Schlissel, Esq., about my post yesterday regarding the case of the Tenaha, TX police department’s use of apparently unreasonable searches and seizures to obtain money and property from travelers through their town to bolster their local budget. I told him that the individuals involved are being sued for violations of the victims’ civil rights. He suggested that those individuals involved may potentially be prosecuted criminally for violations of the Federal Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (“RICO”) law.
After reviewing some of the basic RICO statutes, I think the U.S. Attorney’s office prosecutors may have a case against the officers and individuals involved.
While the town of Tenaha itself is not a proper subject of RICO prosecution because it is not a “person” under the RICO statute, the Marshall, Mayor, Constable and Shelby County D.A., in their individual capacities, would be proper “persons” for RICO prosecution. See Pelfresne v. Village of Rosemont, 22 F.Supp.2d 756, 761 (N.D. Ill. 1998).
If the facts are indeed as the San Antonio Express-News has reported, then over 140 motorists have been stopped and been “willingly” induced to sign over their property with the threat of bogus prosecutions for crimes they were never charged with and which involved searches that probably violated their fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
Furthermore, the Mayor’s comments defending the practice indicated that it was their intent to use these means to bolster the cash-strapped budget of the town’s police force. This implied that their the use of the Texas forfeiture statute to confiscate travelers’ money and property using abuses of their 4th Amendment rights was a coordinated conspiracy.
Travelers’ freedom to pass and bring property between states appears to have been impeded by “wrongful use of… fear… under color of official right.” If indeed this has occurred in over half of the 140 instances of the induced property forfeitures between 2006 and 2008, and it can be shown that the officials involved took part in at least two instances of extortion each, then it would appear that the Marshall, Constable, Mayor and D.A. in Tenaha and Shelby County may be susceptible to criminal (and perhaps civil) RICO prosecution.
At the very least, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Texas ought to look into whether an investigation should be opened to determine if criminal RICO prosecution may be appropriate.
Police Stop, Search & Confiscate Everything You Have…?
The Chicago Tribune has just picked up on a story from over a month ago at mysanantonio.com. The Texas town of Tenaha is using a state forfeiture law that gives the police the right to seize any property used in a crime to bolster that department’s budget. Police officers have been using this law to stop cars traveling through their tiny (pop. about 1000) town and they have taken property from over 140 drivers between 2006 and 2008.
Without probable cause that a crime has taken place, and exigent circumstances to justify why the police must search the car without a warrant, police may not search a person’s car unless they have a “reasonable suspicion” that a person poses a danger to the police officer. And even then, they may only pat down a person or search in their immediate vicinity to the extent that such a search may help them find any weapons that could be used against them. They may not search outside of that scope searching for evidence of any crime however. Terry v. Ohio.
In some cases, the only “factual basis” for the drug or money laundering “charges” was the presence of larger sums of money in the car. And even for that, they would have had to search the car to find the motorists’ expensive property or cash without any “reasonable suspicion” of a threat to the police officer. In such a situation, that would be unconstitutional as well.
Normally, the remedy for the police’s violation of someone’s 4th Amendment rights would be suppression of any evidence obtained throught that violation. But in this case, since the individuals chose to sign over their property to the police, and no charges were filed, there is no evidence to suppress. Thus, the only remedy for a violation of these people’s Constitutional rights is by civil remedy, a §1983 discrimination case.
Thus, David Guillory, attorney for the so-far eight plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the town of Tenaha, filed a §1983 Complaint in District Court seeking compensation for the town’s violation of his clients’ Fourth Amendment Constitutional rights.
If the facts are proven to be as egregious as Mr. Guillory and the aforelinked articles suggest, I very much hope he is successful in his case against the town and that the State adopts more stringent rules to prevent abuses like these from happening in the future.
Our office does a lot of criminal defense work, so I am always interested in developments in 4th Amendment Search and Seizure law.
Last month, the Supreme Court made it more difficult for a defendant to have evidence suppressed in its decision in the case of Herring v. U.S. In that case, police consulted clerks in a neighboring county regarding the existance of an arrest warrant for Mr. Herring. They had not updated their system to reflect that an arrest warrant against Herring was not current. In reliance on the arrest warrant that they thought existed, police arrested Herring and found drugs and a gun. Herring moved to suppress the evidence against him because it was found in the course of an arrest that was not supported by a valid warrant.
The Fourth Amendment Blog reported on the Illinois Appellate Court case of People v. Morgan from two weeks ago where the police tried to rely on Herring to avoid the exclusion of certain evidence of drug crimes that the police found while executing an invalid search warrant at Morgan’s home. There, the police relied on a list of search warrants that was up to three days old, rather than following their own procedure of printing out an updated list of valid search warrants every day.
Quite appropriately in my opinion, the Illinois appellate court reversed the trial court’s decision not to suppress the evidence. It held that Herring’s ruling was not applicable to the facts surrounding the search of Morgan’s home.
In Herring, the error in updating the warrant records was made by a clerk, not by the authors actually executing the warrant, as was the case with Morgan. Since the mistake was not made by police officers, exclusion of the evidence couldn’t meaningfully deter the not-systematically-negligent conduct of those non-police officers.
In Herring, the officers’ reliance on the warrant was not negligent because they were told it was valid by the clerk. But the officers were negligent in Morgan because they used an up to three day old warrant list without even attempting to verify the continued validity of the search warrant against Morgan.
The mistake that led to the out-of-date warrant in Herring was merely negligent, and therefore would not be meaningfully deterred by excluding the evidence obtained in the course of executing that warrant. But in Morgan, Exclusion of the evidence would lead to meaningful deterrence because it will motivate officers to be careful to use up-to-date warrant lists, as per their own department’s policy.
Herring was not meant, by the Supreme Court, to give carte blanche approval of police negilgence in the execution of warrants and should not be used that way. Society’s need for order and protection from criminals is essential, but the power to invade private homes and detain people is a great and awesome power, and thus it comes with a heavy burden of responsibility to exercise that power with great care.
Understanding when the police can frisk you: Nicole Black at Sui Generis offers her take on the pros and cons of the Supreme Court decision in Arizona v. Johnson, that I commented on here.

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