Lies the government told you by Andrew Napolitano (big screen ebook reader .TXT) 📕

total of $124,700, in order to purchase a truck. They found the truck they wanted and agreed with a used car dealer in Chicago to purchase it for cash. Unfortunately, when Emiliano arrived in Chicago, the truck had been sold. Rather than spend the money flying back, and not having a credit card of his own, Emiliano requested that a friend rent a car for him. He packed the money in his trunk and headed home to return the money to all those in the partnership.

Unfortunately, he was pulled over by a Nebraska state trooper somewhere on Interstate 80. The officer searched his car and found the money. Of course, the money was automatically seized because a canine sniffed drug residue in the trunk of a rental car. The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals held that “possession of a large sum of cash is ‘strong evidence’ of a connection to drug activity.” Even though the money had never been tied to any drug purchases; even though, as the dissent noted, Emiliano had never been convicted of a drug-related crime; even though no actual drugs or drug paraphernalia were ever found in the car; and even though the only connection was some drug residue in a rental car that was “no doubt driven by dozens . . . of patrons during the course of a given year.”19

Because the courts do not take seriously the presumption of innocence, because they will permit government theft based on suppositions, because they essentially reject the natural right to use and possess one’s property unmolested by the government, because they do not accept the right to be left alone, they permit the government to perpetuate these horrendous injustices. Think about it. You and I could not have lawfully stolen Mr. Gonzolez’s cash and had a court let us keep it because he could not prove it was his. So, if the government “derive[s]” its “just Powers from the Consent of the Governed,” as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, then how can the government do anything that we as individuals cannot? Even though Emiliano Gonzolez was never convicted of a crime, the life savings of the individuals involved as well as his own were forfeited to the government that stole it.

The government often justifies these takings as a way to take the profit out of crime. Yet when the agents of the state become accustomed to seizing property and not having to return it, they will often then take that property for their personal use. Such was a case that I was confronted with while on the Superior Court bench in New Jersey in 1990. A young man had been arrested for allegedly transporting women across the George Washington Bridge for certain illicit purposes. After the police arrested and charged him, they seized the car that he had supposedly used for such purposes.

Lucky for the police, the car was a beautiful $85,000 Mercedes Benz coup. (The present-day version of this car sells for $160,000.) Even luckier for the chief prosecutor of the county, the police proceeded to gift the car to him, and he proceeded to use it as his own personal car. Imagine the outrage of being presumed innocent, having your car seized, and then, walking down the street, observing the men who had stolen it, driving it. Imagine then that you had no legal recourse, that the law that was meant to protect you instead validated the theft.

Unfortunately for the prosecutor, the defendant who was driving the car did not own the Mercedes; his father did. Needless to say, when the young man and his father petitioned me to have the car returned, I did just that. A few years later, I was accosted by the former prosecutor’s wife as the judge who had taken her husband’s car away. The former prosecutor who used the car has since been convicted of unrelated crimes, incarcerated, disbarred, and presently works as a night security guard at a hotel.

These stories are just a few about the forfeiture laws in the United States, but they so aptly debunk the myth that one is innocent until proven guilty. Once your money or property is seized, which can be done for no apparent reason, it is your burden to prove your innocence and your ownership of your asset. The reason that we have laws stating that one is innocent until proven guilty is because it is so very hard to prove a negative. Just imagine trying to prove that the twenty dollars in your wallet right now are yours legally, that you did not steal them, especially if there is no specific accusation as to whom you stole the money from, when you stole, it, or how. Instead, like sheep we permit the government to say, “I am going to assume that this is stolen, and if you want it back, prove to me that it is not.” Now imagine that the money was your entire life savings.

Guilty by Presumed Association

In 2000, the U.S. Department of State Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, reporting on the Egyptian custom of trying those accused of terrorism in front of military tribunals, noted that “military courts do not ensure civilian defendants due process before an independent tribunal.” Yet only a few years later, the federal government apparently felt that this statement did not apply to it and enacted a law allowing any noncitizen suspected of being a terrorist to be tried by a military commission.

The last time the government used a military tribunal in this country to try foreigners who violated the rules of war involved Nazi saboteurs during World War II. They came ashore in Amagansett, New York, and Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, and donned civilian clothes, with plans to blow up strategic U.S. targets. They were tried before a military tribunal, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt based his order to do so on the existence of a formal congressional declaration of war against Germany.

In the uproar caused by Attorney