Well, I agree, but it is a significant improvement over the current status of indefinite asset seizure being essentially the law of the land everywhere.
Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc.
You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional.
It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary.
This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.
Some amount of asset seizure is legitimate. Cops do need to hold evidence, for instance. Money seized from drug dealers can’t be given back to them while they await trial. Etc.
You couldn’t really effectively put a 90 day cap (or any hard number) on asset retention without either having it be too short or too long in many cases. It’s not a court’s job (and shouldn’t be) to do so, it’s a court’s job to rule that a seizure that happened was or was not unconstitutional.
It is my hope (and has been for a long time) that the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, but they rarely would do anything even remotely like setting a hard limit. They’ll leave that to states and lower courts to determine what makes sense and then possibly hear future challenges as necessary.
This is an example, I think, of the system working well to correct an issue. It does seem to me inline with the intention of the amendment to consider indefinite asset seizure unconstitutional, but I’m not a constitutional lawyer or a Supreme Court Justice so we’ll see. They’re likely to grant certiorari here.