For over 30 years, Terry Dehko has successfully run a grocery store in Fraser, Michigan, with his daughter Sandy. On January 22, 2013, Terry and Sandy woke up to find that all of the money in the store’s bank account had been cleaned out (more than $35,000) without warning or explanation. Later, they learned that the federal government had seized the account using a process known as civil forfeiture.
Civil forfeiture is the governmental power to take property suspected of being involved in crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, in which the ill-gotten gains of criminal activity may be seized after an individual is convicted of a crime, prosecutors can use civil forfeiture to take property without having to convict or even charge a person with any crime. The property taken by the government is then used to pad the budgets of the very agencies that seize it.
In this case, the government claimed that Terry and Sandy violated federal banking laws by making frequent deposits of their store’s cash receipts in amounts less than $10,000. Banks are required to report larger deposits to the IRS. But it’s not illegal merely to deposit lesser amounts when one has a legitimate business purpose for doing so like Terry and Sandy did. Had the government simply bothered to ask, it would have learned that they were not trying to avoid those banking regulations. But it didn’t ask and, eight months later, the family is still waiting for hearing before a judge, which the Constitution requires in order to protect innocent people from wrongful takings like this one.
Unfortunately, when federal agencies seize cash, federal civil forfeiture laws, as currently written, provide no prompt way to get a court to review the seizure. The perverse incentives and lack of due process at the heart of civil forfeiture put innocent people like Terry and Sandy at risk. Click here to view video.
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