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From: Rick Kisséll <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, Mar 9, 2009 at 10:12 PM
Subject: [The_Forum_] Chi. Trib. 3/10/09: Highway robbery? Texas police
seize black motorists' cash, cars
To: The Forum <[email protected]>
Highway robbery? Texas police seize black motorists' cash, cars
by Howard Witt
Chicago Tribune correspondent
March 10, 2009
TENAHA, Texas—You can drive into this dusty fleck of a town near the
Texas-Louisiana border if you're African-American, but you might not be able
to drive out of it—at least not with your car, your cash, your jewelry or
other valuables.
That's because the police here allegedly have found a way to strip
motorists, many of them black, of their property without ever charging them
with a crime. Instead they offer out-of-towners a grim choice: voluntarily
sign over your belongings to the town, or face felony charges of money
laundering or other serious crimes.
More than 140 people reluctantly accepted that deal from June 2006 to June
2008, according to court records. Among them were a black grandmother from
Akron, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over,
and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after
police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care, the
court documents show. Neither the grandmother nor the couple were charged
with any crime.
Officials in Tenaha, situated along a heavily traveled state highway
connecting Houston with popular gambling destinations in Louisiana, say they
are engaged in a battle against drug trafficking, and they call the
search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state's asset-forfeiture
law. That law permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other
property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their
budgets.
"We try to enforce the law here," said George Bowers, mayor of the town of
1,046 residents, where boarded-up businesses outnumber open ones and City
Hall sports a broken window. "We're not doing this to raise money. That's
all I'm going to say at this point."
But civil rights lawyers call Tenaha's practice something else: highway
robbery. The attorneys have filed a federal class-action lawsuit to stop
what they contend is an unconstitutional perversion of the law's intent,
aimed primarily at blacks who have done nothing wrong.
Tenaha officials "have developed an illegal 'stop and seize' practice of
targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from
apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens,"
asserts the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern
District of Texas.
The property seizures are not just happening in Tenaha. In southern parts of
Texas near the Mexican border, for example, Hispanics allege that they are
being singled out.
According to a prominent Texas state legislator, police agencies across the
state are wielding the asset-forfeiture law more aggressively to supplement
their shrinking operating budgets.
"If used properly, it's a good law-enforcement tool to see that crime
doesn't pay," said state Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate's
Criminal Justice Committee. "But in this instance, where people are being
pulled over and their property is taken with no charges filed and no
convictions, I think that's theft."
David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit,
said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and
discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property
from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug
possession.
But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, the police seized
cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but
never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. Of those,
Guillory said he managed to contact 40 of the motorists directly—and
discovered all but one of them were black.
"The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities,
particularly African-Americans," Guillory said. "Every one of these people
is pulled over and told they did something, like, 'You drove too close to
the white line.' That's not in the penal code, but it sounds plausible. None
of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in
anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something
that looked valuable."
In some cases, police used the fact that motorists were carrying large
amounts of cash as evidence that they must have been involved in laundering
drug money, even though Guillory said each of the drivers he contacted could
account for where the money had come from and why they were carrying it—such
as for a gambling trip to Shreveport, La., or to purchase a used car from a
private seller.
Once the motorists were detained, the police and the local Shelby County
district attorney quickly drew up legal papers presenting them with an
option: waive their rights to their cash and property or face felony charges
for crimes such as money laundering—and the prospect of having to hire a
lawyer and return to Shelby County multiple times to attend court sessions
to contest the charges.
The process apparently is so routine in Tenaha that Guillory discovered
presigned and prenotarized police affidavits with blank spaces left for an
officer to fill in a description of the property being seized.
Jennifer Boatright, her husband and two young children—a mixed-race
family—were traveling from Houston to visit relatives in east Texas in April
2007 when Tenaha police pulled them over, alleging that they were driving in
a left-turn lane.
After searching the car, the officers discovered what Boatright said was a
gift for her sister: a small, unused glass pipe made for smoking marijuana.
Although they found no drugs or other contraband, the police seized $6,037
that Boatright said the family was carrying to purchase a used car—and then
threatened to turn their children, ages 10 and 1, over to Child Protective
Services if the couple didn't agree to sign over their right to their cash.
"It was give them the money or they were taking our kids," Boatright said.
"They suggested that we never bring it up again. We figured we better give
them our cash and get the hell out of there."
Several months later, after Boatright and her husband contacted an attorney,
Tenaha officials returned their money but offered no explanation or apology.
The couple remain plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit.
Except for Tenaha's mayor, none of the defendants in the federal lawsuit,
including Shelby County District Atty. Linda Russell and two Tenaha police
officers, responded to requests from the Tribune for comment about their
search-and-seizure practices. Lawyers for the defendants also declined to
comment, as did several of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
But Whitmire says he doesn't need to await the suit's outcome to try to fix
what he regards as a statewide problem. On Monday he introduced a bill in
the state Legislature that would require police to go before a judge before
attempting to seize property under the asset-forfeiture law—and ultimately
Whitmire hopes to tighten the law further so that law-enforcement officials
will be allowed to seize property only after a suspect is charged and
convicted in a court.
"The law has gotten away from what was intended, which was to take the
profits of a bad guy's crime spree and use it for additional crime
fighting," Whitmire said. "Now it's largely being used to pay police
salaries—and it's being abused because you don't even have to be a bad guy
to lose your property."
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