Court Opinion

ID: 9483276
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:15:49.527556+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:31.656723
License: Public Domain

KRUPANSKY, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur in the majority opinion in this case only because of the existing precedent in this circuit enunciated in United States v. Certain Real Property (Certain Real Property I), 910 F.2d 343 (6th Cir.1990), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 1414, 113 L.Ed.2d 467 (1991), a decision in which I did not concur. As I predicted in that dissent, and as the tortured history of this case illustrates, the federal forfeiture statutes require a uniform federal common law under which the government would receive an immediate divisible interest upon forfeiture in an erring defendant’s real property regardless of the incidents of state law that attach to the estate of the owners of record or the recorded tenancy in which the property is held. A federally, uniformly imposed tenancy in common that preempts the myriad of divergent statutory tenancies and estates existing throughout the nation, in this case the state of Michigan’s statutory indivisible tenancies in the entirety, would have permitted the government, in the instant case, to receive an immediate divisible interest in the real property here in issue and would have eliminated the entangling, burdensome custodial responsibilities imposed upon the government during the interim period of time between the date of forfeiture and the occurrence of a triggering condition that converts the property into a divisible estate.
The legal principle imposed in Certain Real Property I and in the opinion of this case perpetuates interminable delays fraught with unforeseeable, unpredictable complications, legal actions, and unnecessary continuing commitments of judicial resources between the criminal act of the erring spouse and the government’s realization of its interest in the forfeited property. For example, in the instant action the government not only was required to monitor the sale of the property or the death of the innocent spouse, but should have asserted its interest in the forfeited property in a pending divorce action between the parties which had not been disclosed to the district court, the United States Attorney, or in the plaintiff’s briefs or arguments during the first appellate review before this court. The disposition of that divorce proceeding, before the district court’s initial decision, converted the sur-vivorship estate into an immediately divisible tenancy in common by operation of law pursuant to Michigan statute. Michigan Compiled Laws § 552.102 (West 1988). The vital, withheld information concerning the divorce which presently prompts this court to remand this case to the district court for a third time for resolution, which resolution will undoubtedly result in a third appeal, demonstrates the total waste of time, money, effort, and judicial resources that has been spawned by the precedent enunciated in Certain Real Property I.