How The DEA Seized A College Student’s Entire Life Savings, Without Charging Him With A Drug Crime
Carrying cash is not a crime. But that didn’t stop the federal government from seizing $11,000 from Charles Clarke.
Charles, a 24-year-old college student, was flying home after visiting family and friends in Cincinnati, when he lost his entire life savings to civil forfeiture. With this power, government agents do not need to convict, much less charge someone with a crime to take his property; mere suspicion is enough.
After Charles checked in his luggage at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport in February 2014, a ticket agent smelled marijuana and contacted the authorities. A task force officer with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and an airport police detective soon intercepted Charles as he was waiting for his flight at the gate.
The officers searched both Charles and his carry-on bag. Charles admitted that he smoked marijuana but the agents never found any drugs or any evidence of a crime on Charles or in his luggage. During the encounter, the DEA agent asked Charles if he was carrying any cash. He said yes and took out $11,000—his entire life savings.
Over the past five years, Charles had skimped and saved that money from odd jobs, financial aid, family gifts and benefits from his mother being an injured Army veteran. Charles was carrying his cash because his bank has few physical branches and he and his mother were in the process of moving and he didn’t want to lose his life savings in the move while he was in Cincinnati.
His fears became all too real. The officers seized Charles’s money, claiming they had “probable cause” that his cash was the “proceeds of drug trafficking or was intended to be used in a drug transaction.” Yet the government did not indict Charles with any drug crime. In other words, despite finding no drugs and filing no drug charges, the agents were convinced Charles was a drug dealer. Federal prosecutors later filed a motion to forfeit his cash.
As Charles learned first-hand, those caught in civil forfeiture proceedings face a lack of due process. Until recently, Charles was defending himself against the federal government without an attorney. While the accused in criminal proceedings enjoy a right to counsel, that right does not apply to civil forfeiture. Even more incredibly, Charles must bear the burden of proof and prove his innocence if he wants to win back his cash.
“Once it’s seized and gone through the seizure process, it’s very difficult to reverse that,” noted former DEA Special Agent Finn Selander, and now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “A lot of people have been railroaded,” he added.
In a surreal twist, Charles isn’t even the defendant in his own case; his cash is. So the official name of his civil forfeiture proceeding is United States of America v. $11,000 in U.S. Currency.
Charles’s case highlights the growing threat civil forfeiture poses to Americans’ constitutionally protected rights and liberties. In 2014 alone, the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport received over $530,000 in federal forfeiture funds, the third-highest total in the state. Similarly, cash seizures have increased greatly, with almost 100 cash seizures each year, up from under 10 seizures in 2002.
Moreover, the DEA has a long history of seizing cash at airports without pursuing any drug charges. In a case that made national headlines in the early 1990s (and parallels Charles’s current plight), the DEA seized $9,000 from Willie Jones, despite never charging him with a crime. Jones ran a landscaping business and was headed from Nashville to Houston. After paying for an airline ticket in cash, the ticket clerk reported him to the DEA.
Law enforcement officers searched Jones and seized the cash he was carrying. He was stunned: “I didn’t know it was against the law for a 42-year-old black man to have money in his pocket.” After a two-year struggle, a federal judge ordered the DEA to return the cash back to Jones in 1993. Frontline even covered his case. Jones himself later testified before Congress when it debated the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act (CAFRA), which ultimately enacted modest, procedural reforms to the nation’s civil forfeiture laws.
But CAFRA is ridden with loopholes. It leaves untouched equitable sharing, a federal forfeiture program that lets local and state law enforcement keep up to 80 percent of the value of a forfeited property. That clearly creates a perverse incentive. Through equitable sharing, law enforcement agencies across the country have seized $2.5 billion from nearly 62,000 cash seizures since 9/11. Like Charles, the government never charged any of these owners with a drug crime. And in Charles’s case, 13 different agencies are now clamoring for a cut of his cash, 11 of which took no part in the seizure.
Nor is the DEA limited to seizing cash at airports. According to a report released in January by the Office of the Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Justice, interdiction task force groups for the DEA have “seized $163 million in 4,138 individual cash seizures” from 2009 to 2013 by prowling the nation’s airports, bus stations and train stations. During that same period, half of all DEA cash seizures were under $10,000, analysis by the Institute for Justice revealed.
With help from the Institute for Justice, Charles is determined to vindicate his civil rights. “No one should have to go through the nightmare I went through simply because they choose to carry their hard-earned cash,” he said.
If you or anyone you know has been a victim of civil forfeiture, please contact the Institute for Justice. For more information on civil forfeiture, visit endforfeiture.com.
Filed under: General Problems
I guess I wonder why a ticket agent who allegedly smelled pot would call the DEA — because smelling like pot is obviously not some kind of threat. I also wonder how many times a ticket agent smelled pot on a white person, and then did nothing.
Now that I’m doing all this wondering… I wonder if this guy had an $11,000 guitar instead of cash, if that guitar would’ve found a new home with some DEA agent. I wonder if this guy had been wearing a gold necklace worth thousands of dollars, if that would have been confiscated too. I wonder if this guy had been carrying a rare book worth thousands of dollars if that would have also disappeared into DEA custody.
I wonder if this guy suffered from a fear of flying and smoked a little pot to handle his anxiety. I wonder why that’s so much different than drinking yourself senseless before or during a flight.
I wonder how many DEA agents have smoked pot and snorted cocaine while they were partying with their cartel buddies and prostitutes. And finally, i wonder how DEA agents can sleep at night.
I guess I wonder why some of them dont have the money in a cashiers check or couple of them amd just open a new deposit where they’re going. Dont banks cash travelers checks any more???