Mississippi Governor Extends Middle Finger To Constitution On Twitter While Applauding Asset Forfeiture

Legal Issues

from the time-for-state-voters-to-use-the-EJECT-button dept

Nearly two years ago, Mississippi governor Phil Bryant signed a bill reforming the state’s asset forfeiture programs. The state needed it. Mississippi’s law enforcement has directly profited from asset forfeiture for years. This has been combined with an extremely low evidentiary bar and zero reporting requirements to completely skew the incentives. Making it so easy to just take stuff from citizens has resulted in things like this:

That conflict [of interest] is on full display in Richland, Miss., where construction of a new $4.1 million law enforcement training facility was funded entirely by forfeiture proceeds garnered by police in Richland—a town of just 7,000 people. A sign in the building’s window boasts: “Richland Police Station tearfully donated by drug dealers.”

And this:

Mississippi drug warriors had their eye on nearly $300,000 in “forfeited” funds but threw it all away by issuing one of the most deficient search warrants ever. It’s not that it was loaded with errors or questionable probable cause assertions. It’s that it omitted perhaps the single most important element of a search warrant — the location being searched.

When the forfeiture is a foregone conclusion, small towns end up with multi-million dollar facilities and supposed drug warriors with an eye on someone else’s money can’t even be bothered to fill out the paperwork. The reforms were needed and Governor Phil Bryant approved them.

Not that it mattered to local law enforcement.

Mississippi police agencies have been seizing cash, guns and vehicles without legal authority for months after a state law changed and police didn’t notice.

An Associated Press review of a Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics database shows more than 60 civil asset forfeitures with nearly $200,000 in property taken by state and local agencies under a law that lapsed on June 30.

The state’s cops just kept taking stuff under the old rules. And why not? They weren’t detail oriented under the old system. That wasn’t going to change just because legislators passed a law directly affecting their work. It certainly didn’t matter to law enforcement that the top official in the state — Governor Phil Bryant — had given his approval of the reforms by signing the bill into law.

Apparently it doesn’t matter to Governor Phil Bryant either.

If you can’t read/see the tweet, here’s the Mississippi governor telling residents they and their precious Constitutional rights can go fuck themselves.

When drug dealers have taken over your neighborhood, call a Constitutional scholar and see how that works out for you.

Governor Bryant’s tweet links to the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, which has just sent him a letter asking him (and other state legislators) not to roll back the minor reforms that went into effect last year. His tweet directly mocks Ilya Shapiro, the Constitutional scholar quoted in the Center’s post. And it directly mocks everyone who saw law enforcement abusing a weapon in its drug war arsenal to strip property from citizens with almost zero accountability or avenues of recourse.

In short, Governor Bryant thinks cops should have more rights and people not even accused of crimes should have less. That’s an extremely shitty look for someone representing one of the fifty states of the United States of America.

Filed Under: asset forfeiture, civil asset forfeiture, legalized theft, mississippi, phil bryant, stealing