May 14, 2018 | Blog, News
Our Editorial: Get cops out of fencing racket
The Detroit News | The Detroit News
A bill moving through the state Legislature would get police out of the petty theft racket, but would leave the door open for them to continue engaging in grand larceny. Still, it’s an important step, and the measure should be adopted.
Civil asset forfeiture is an affront to constitutionally protected property rights and the fundamental legal concept of innocent until proven guilty. And yet it is practiced by nearly all of Michigan’s law enforcement agencies and protected by state law.
The House bill pushed by Speaker Tom Leonard, R-DeWitt, would drastically restrict this legalized theft.
The bill, HB 4158, would require a conviction before most private property could be seized from individuals and transferred to the government.
That may seem like a common sense condition, and certainly a fair one, but that is not the current practice in Michigan.
Here, police are able to grab property on the mere suspicion that it was gained from or helped facilitate criminal activity. In fact, 10 percent of those who have their assets seized are never criminally charged.
Getting the property back is a cumbersome and expensive process, and many of those whose possessions were taken find the effort to recover them not worth the time and money.
Property that is seized is most often sold and the proceeds used to fund police operations. That provides a perverse incentive for cops to find a connection between the assets and a suspected crime.
In a number of cases, cash and other items have been taken from houses and automobiles even when no trace of drugs or other illegal contraband is found inside.
In 2016, $15.3 million in private property was seized under the civil asset forfeiture law. Some years, the value has reached $25 million.
Three years ago the Legislature reformed the law to raise the standard of evidence required before property can be taken, and also demanded better accounting from police agencies about why assets were confiscated.
That has cut into the total amount taken, but the practice of grabbing private property without a conviction has continued. It would end under the House bill, at least for smaller seizures.
The proposed bill would still permit seizures of assets valued above $50,000, on the theory that such big-ticket items are a likely indication of drug activity. That reasoning is obviously flawed. There are a lot of non-criminal reasons someone may possess that much cash or other property.
Police should not be operating on assumptions. No property should be taken and held without enough evidence for a criminal conviction.
Law enforcement agencies are lobbying the Legislature hard to scrap the bill, arguing forfeiture is an important tool in combatting the drug trade. In reality, it has become a vital piece of their operating budgets.
If police need more money, raise taxes, but don’t steal the property of citizens.
Lawmakers should get police out of this sordid business by ending civil asset forfeiture in cases where no one has been convicted of a crime.
See Detroit News Artcle
Aug 24, 2017 | Blog, Criminal Defense Attorney Michael Komorn, Recent Victories, Victories Project
Komorn Law PLLC is proud to report a ruling today from the Genesee County Circuit Court.
This case involved my client’s property and all kinds of salacious allegations of really bad behavior by this property, and I mean bad stuff, like stuff you could never imagine property could actually do.
To add to the drama of all this unimaginable behavior by my clients property, the accuser was an ” entity” called FANG. The story for the last 3 years, told by the State ( the ATTORNEY’S for FANG) was that that the bad behaving property needed to be held by FANG, because it was bad behaving ( if this makes no sense, it is not supposed to).
Additionally FANG was of the opinion that because of these allegations they should be able to keep all of my client’s bad behaving property (there has been no conviction).
Today in the civil forfeiture against my client and his “allegedly evil” property the Court granted our motion for summary disposition ( no genuine issue of fact existed to which reasonable minds could differ) ultimately dismissing the forfeiture case and ordering the return of all that bad behaving property.
https://komornlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Komorn-Law-Victory-in-Genesee-County-170823.pdf
File this one in the category:
#PolicingForProfit
#StopTheRaids
#ForfeitureAbuse
#TrialLawyer @KomornLawMI
#DeweyRocks
Apr 9, 2017 | Blog, News
OAKLAND COUNTY, Mich. – The owner of an Oakland County medical marijuana dispensary said he’s been unfairly targeted by police in the form of raids and civil forfeitures.
Meanwhile, police said they’re just enforcing the law.
The case sits at the forefront of the fight to legalize marijuana in Michigan.
Investigators close to the case said Donald Barnes is a marijuana dealer hiding behind medical marijuana laws, but Barnes said the dispensary raided by police is a nonprofit that he has no ownership in. The legal battle has gone on for almost three years, and Barnes’ money and property is still tied up in a forfeiture battle.
Barnes insists he is the victim of overzealous police.
“It was two days before Christmas, and we started Christmas shopping already,” Barnes said. “They seized the Christmas gifts.”
He claims officials wrongfully raided his business and seized pot, property and bank accounts.
“They seized personal assets, not just my business bank accounts, but they also seized stuff from my home and my personal properties,” Barnes said.
Barnes was eventually given criminal charges.
“They arrested me and told me I was being charged with selling marijuana because I owned a dispensary,” Barnes said.
But police told a different story. They stand behind the raids, forfeiture and criminal charges, saying it wasn’t a medical marijuana operation for the sick but a large-scale pot-for-profit operation.
The two sides ended up in the courtroom, where Barnes scored a victory.
“In this case, the Oakland County Circuit Court, I think, called the Sheriff’s Department on their tactics and pointed out that they clearly had no justification to do what they did to Mr. Barnes or his business,” attorney David Moffitt said.
Moffitt said when the judge invalidated the search by police and dismissed the criminal charges against Barnes, it sent a strong message and should convince police to give Barnes his money and property back.
“You know, if you go around and you frighten people in this fashion and take their assets and tell them (that) if they just let that go then they won’t be prosecuted,” Moffitt said. “If it weren’t being done by people with badges, it would be called extortion.”
Prosecutors and police said the judge’s ruling was wrong. They’re appealing, so the controversy is far from over.
“I mean, this is Oakland County, one of the richest counties in the country,” Barnes said. “There’s not too many people that are going to be able to push them around. They push people around.”
A judge has ruled that $10,000 seized from Barnes be returned to him. A hearing to resolve the rest of the forfeited property was adjourned Wednesday and moved to August.
In some states, property cannot be forfeited until a person is convicted, but in Michigan, the property is taken and returned if a person is found not guilty.
Copyright 2017 by WDIV ClickOnDetroit – All rights reserved.
Donald Barnes says police unfairly seized assets
By Kevin Dietz – Reporter , Derick Hutchinson
Posted: 6:01 PM, April 05, 2017Updated: 6:01 PM, April 05, 2017
http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/defenders/oakland-county-marijuana-dispensary-claims-it-was-unfairly-targeted-by-police
Mar 1, 2017 | Blog, News
His lawyers say he’s the innocent victim of illegal search and seizure aimed at medical-marijuana users. Police and prosecutors beg to differ
Donny Barnes said he just wants to be a regular guy.
He just wants to run his small businesses scattered around Oakland County. Just wants to hang out with his family at their split-level home on a woodsy street. And just wants to keep using medical marijuana for calming the neck and shoulder pain that Barnes said has plagued him ever since he was in a snowboarding accident at age 19.
But a drug bust in 2014 “turned my life upside down,” said Barnes, 41, of Orion Township. Police seized his property, shutting down his antique resale and spyware businesses, and charged him with possessing more than 100 pounds of marijuana, which Barnes and his lawyers argued didn’t belong to him.
This month, after two years of legal battles, Barnes’ lawyers claimed what they called a rare victory against the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, widely known for its aggressive prosecutions of medical-marijuana cases; and against the confiscatory tactics of OAKNET, the county’s much-feared Narcotics Enforcement Team.
Oakland Circuit Judge Denise Langford Morris dismissed a criminal charge against Barnes — marijuana possession with intent to distribute — and she ruled that police had failed to establish probable cause for raiding Barnes’ house, his office and warehouse.
Ecstatic at the ruling early this month, Barnes’ lawyers said it was a sign that times are changing — that a Michigan judge, even in such a conservative bastion as Oakland County, refused to continue waging the discredited war on drugs against one of Michigan’s medical marijuana users.
Yet, Oakland County law-enforcement officials said Barnes merely got lucky with a lenient judge and that, on appeal, the tables would be turned.
A county sheriff’s spokesman said that detectives had indisputable evidence of Barnes having been a big-time marijuana dealer, one who’d tried to hide his illegal activity under the cloak of medical marijuana while overseeing the sale of plastic baggies of marijuana to total strangers — a violation of the state law that allows “transfers” of the medicinal drug but only from a state-registered “caregiver” to that person’s five registered “patients.”
► Police seize property and cash in questionable raids
► Watchdog group gives Michigan a ‘D-‘ on forfeiture laws
► Cannabis industry roiled by White House comments on enforcement
The spokesman said that nothing about the ruling would change the tactics of Oakland County’s drug investigators. And the prosecutor’s office said it decided last week to appeal.
The outcome of the appeal could decide not only Barnes’ fate but also whether his case becomes a landmark ruling that aids others in similar circumstances.
The appeal of the case will explore just what constitutes a legal search and seizure of citizens in Michigan, who have faced civil forfeiture of their cars, cash and even their farmland and houses in some marijuana busts.
It will be argued in a year when Michigan could pivot toward more tolerance of the drug, or the state could adopt even tighter restraints under a Trump administration whose top law enforcer is the notoriously anti-marijuana Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
And the appeal will occur in a year that began with Gov. Rick Snyder signing a bill that gives limited protections to citizens facing civil forfeiture; they no longer must pay a bond of 10% of the value of their seized property to challenge the forfeiture in court. When Snyder signed the bill in early January, both sides of the political spectrum in Michigan — both the conservative/Libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy and the liberal American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan — called for more protections.
Outside Michigan, in 12 other states, law enforcement must get a criminal conviction before a suspect forfeits property, and in two states — New Mexico and Nebraska — civil forfeiture is altogether banned, Jarrett Skorup, spokesman for the Mackinac Center, said in the news release.
It was late November 2014 when police shook up what Barnes said was his tranquil lifestyle.
“They even took the Christmas presents I had wrapped for my kids,” Barnes said.
Heavily armed police in masks seized his family’s cars as well as the business computers, tools and considerable inventory of his several trades, and took the contents of several bank accounts including one belonging to his mother. That scenario is a familiar one around Michigan, and especially in Oakland County, where authorities are notorious among marijuana users for being merciless to those accused of skirting Michigan’s medical marijuana act.
Countless defendants in such cases, lacking the money to mount aggressive legal defenses, have been forced to plea bargain, to give up their possessions and accept jail or prison sentences as well as pay fines said David Moffitt a Bingham Farms lawyer.
One of two attorneys defending Barnes. Because his family “has significant resources,” Barnes was able to fight back and win the dismissal, Moffitt said.
This ruling “sends a strong message that in appropriate procedures on the part of police and prosecutors will result in dismissal. To have an Oakland County judge dismiss search warrants for faulty procedures is a game-changer in the state because everyone looks at Oakland County for their legal leadership on key issues.
“What this judge said was that you can’t just kick down doors and seize people’s property without having good reason to do so,” he said.
The same judge, after reviewing a lengthy brief submitted by Barnes’ attorneys, allowed him in a ruling last fall to use medical marijuana while out on bond “for a very demonstrable medical need,” instead of the opioid painkilling pills that caused him dangerous side effects, Moffitt said.
Getting a judge’s approval to use the drug as a bond condition is rare enough, but Moffitt said he was thrilled that Langford Morris wrote a detailed opinion justifying her circuit court ruling, making it precedent-setting for the state, he said.
One strikingly unfair tactic of Oakland County authorities is to arrest a medical-marijuana user, seize property “and then not even file charges if the defendant doesn’t contest the forfeiture — that’s become a standard approach there,” Moffitt added. Barnes wasn’t arrested until 14 months after the raids, seemingly not until he “aggressively challenged and contested the forfeiture case” in a civil case completely separate from his criminal case, his lawyer said.
“Both Mr. Barnes and I believe that the Oakland County sheriff’s department is protecting us every day, but I think they must agree that not everything they do is done perfectly in every case, and this is one of those cases,” said Moffitt, who is a former Oakland County commissioner from Farmington Hills.
Medical-marijuana cases can be complex, said Oakland County Undersheriff Mike McCabe. And so, there was nothing odd or unfair about how long detectives took to investigate before Barnes was arrested, he said. “With the sensitivity of these cases, the prosecutor goes over them with a fine-tooth comb” before approving arrest warrants, he said.
The sheriff’s and prosecutor’s offices have taken strong and specific issue with the dismissal of charges against Barnes. Among his small-business activities was a monthly free magazine called The Burn, whose masthead listed as publisher “Donald Barnes III.” Each edition was loaded with full-color ads, the most prominent ones being those for Metro Detroit Compassion Club, a facility open six days a week at the same address in Waterford Township as Barnes’ magazine
.
Among the come-ones for the Metro Detroit Compassion Club? “All meds locally grown … Providing our members only the best … We now accept valid out-of-state medical cards.”
That line refers to cards issued by numerous states, including Michigan, showing that someone is approved to use medical marijuana although not approved to buy medical cannabis from just anyone in Michigan except under the state’s tightly controlled system that ties caregivers to five so-called and only five “patients.”
So, when undercover informants of the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office were able to buy medical marijuana last year four times at the Metro Detroit Compassion Club, detectives linked that wrongdoing to Barnes, who was listed as the “resident agent” on the incorporation papers of the nonprofit club.
That’s when they decided to burst into the magazine’s offices, as well as into the compassion club at the same address where they found about two pounds of marijuana, and into a warehouse Barnes owned that was full of marijuana plants and more than 100 pounds of marijuana stored in refrigerators, as well as into Barnes’ rambling modern house that held about four pounds, McCabe said.
Did all of the marijuana belong to Barnes? If the case goes to trial, prosecutors will show that much of it did and the motive was to sell the drug for profit, McCabe said. At the warehouse, “the marijuana was in small baggies in refrigerators,” he said.
As for the nonprofit compassion club, it constituted a dispensary — a retail outlet for selling marijuana, McCabe said. Even though Detroit is said to have more than 100 dispensaries, operating mostly without interference by the Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office, Oakland County authorities abide by the view of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who has declared dispensaries illegal in Michigan.That will soon change, but it hasn’t yet, McCabe said.
Dispensaries are going to be legal in Michigan, through a new law enacted last year, “but not until at least early 2018 — that’s what we’ve been told by people in Lansing; that’s the soonest anybody can get a license to operate one,” McCabe said.
A top attorney at the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office was adamant about not dropping Barnes’ case.
“We felt that the evidence rose to the level showing that Mr. Barnes was violating state law,” said Paul Walton, Oakland County’s chief assistant prosecutor.
The judge “made the statement that Mr. Barnes was simply an officer of the corporation, but there’s every reason to believe that he had significant involvement, if not outright ownership,” in the dispensary masquerading as a nonprofit club, Walton said.
So,was the ruling was a victory for medical-marijuana users across Michigan, as Barnes’ attorneys insist? Or just a temporary setback to the law-enforcement establishment in Oakland County, standard bearers for a rigid approach to users and distributors of medical marijuana?
Only time, and Michigan’s higher courts, will tell.
Contact Bill Laitner: blaitner@freepress.com
