Court Opinion

ID: 9489444
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 13:16:10.338055+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:51:18.330741
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting and concurring.
I concur in the court’s disposition of this case insofar as it deals with the matter of Mrs. Muhammed’s $22,000. But, with respect, I disagree with the court that the notice to the Muhammeds concerning the manner in which they could contest the forfeiture proceeding was constitutionally infirm. It was about as plain as it could have been and the Muhammeds simply failed to follow it. Indeed, the Muhammeds never argued that the notice was in any way deficient. Under these circumstances, the district court was quite correct in dismissing the Rule 41(e) proceeding. See In re Harper, 835 F.2d 1273 (8th Cir.1988).
The court sees fit to discuss the question of whether the money was in fact forfeitable, though that question is irrelevant to a resolution of the legal issue that the case presents. The merits of the government’s forfeiture case are not before us, and, in fact, we do not know what evidence the government would have produced had it been called on to present a case on the merits. The court evidently finds nothing suspicious about a woman having $22,000 stuffed in her girdle. In any event, the court rehearses only part of the government’s justification for seizing the currency, an account produced, evidently, by selecting certain allegations from the motion to dismiss that the government made in the district court. The court does not mention that in that motion the government had maintained that Mr. Muhammed told DEA agents that he had only two thousand dollars on his person when he was interviewed (he had over $70,000), and that he did not even know the last name of his friends with whom he had recently driven from Chicago to St. Louis. Mrs. Muhammed, the government also alleged, had said that the money that she and her husband were carrying did not belong to the Nation of Islam, and, indeed, admitted that it could have come from drug sales. The court also omits to notice the government’s allegation that when it interviewed Mr. Muhammed on a later occasion it was discovered that his ticket and boarding pass were in different names, neither of them Mr. Muhammed’s. But the most remarkable omission from the court’s account of the government’s story is Mr. Muhammed’s evidently straight-faced assertion that the money had been made selling fish products and bean pies on behalf of the Nation of Islam. While this explanation does not involve, I suppose, a physical impossibility, I offer the respectful observation that only the most extraordinarily gullible person would be inclined to accept it without at least a considerable amount of reflection. All of this, as I have already said, is irrelevant in the present posture of the case. My point is simply that if the merits were relevant, as the court evidently believes them to be, it is not manifest that a miscarriage of justice has occurred here.
I would therefore affirm the district court’s judgment with respect to the plaintiffs’ claim to the $70,000 in currency.