{"id":7295,"date":"2009-12-18T08:02:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T13:02:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7295"},"modified":"2009-12-18T10:27:27","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T15:27:27","slug":"more-free-goodies-for-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=7295","title":{"rendered":"More Free Goodies For Government!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court of Minnesota (hereafter referred to as SCOM)\u00a0says “didn’t actually drive drunk?\u00a0 Tough\u00a0– \u00a0W your wife did, so the police get a shiny new Tahoe!<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

An “innocent owner” cannot avoid forfeiture of a vehicle when it is jointly owned with the offender in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split decision published Thursday.<\/p>\n

The case involved a Cambridge man whose wife was cited for drunken driving while driving their 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe. The vehicle was seized from owner David Lee Laase. He argued in district court that the SUV should not have been taken away because he was an “innocent owner” under state law.<\/p>\n

“This is really a major, major decision,” said Isanti County Attorney Jeffrey Edblad, who credited Assistant County Attorney Shila Walek Hooper for her work. “This is a case that obviously has statewide impact as it relates to being able to keep motor vehicles out of the hands of drunk drivers.”<\/p>\n

Laase’s attorney, Brian Karalus, of St. Paul, disagreed.<\/p>\n

“This opens up the floodgates for the government to come in and seize property of a 100 percent, completely innocent person,” he said. “It’s mind-boggling.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, as I’ve pointed out many times to people who get overheated about court decisions, “the law means what it says it means” (which is partly false; it means what it and related case law <\/em>say it means – which is why our society is all clogged with lawyers, who are the only people who can untangle it reliably, since the system was built by lawyers to be completely inscrutable to all the rest of us.\u00a0 But I digress).<\/p>\n

So what does <\/em>the law say?<\/p>\n

Under state law, a vehicle cannot be seized “if its owner can demonstrate by clear and convincing evidence that the owner did not have actual or constructive knowledge that the vehicle would be used or operated in any manner contrary to law or that the owner took reasonable steps to prevent the use of the vehicle by the offender.”<\/p>\n

The district court and Court of Appeals agreed that Laase qualified.<\/p>\n

But the Supreme Court reversed the appeals court’s ruling, saying that “while Mr. Laase may be an innocent owner, Ms. Laase is not.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’m going to suspect there may well be a little bit of backstory there that didn’t make it into the story (inasmuch as the story was likely written by a non-lawyer), but I’m thinking there’s substantial grounds here for a…<\/p>\n

{{facepalm}}<\/p>\n

“Ms. Laase is not” the innocent owner.\u00a0 Right. Got that, SCOM.<\/p>\n

But if one owner’s guilt<\/em> is enough to void the whole “innocent owner” law, then there’s no such thing as an innocent owner, is there?\u00a0\u00a0 There’s only “owners who don’t co-own things with anyone accused of anything”, and “guilty owners and their victims”.<\/p>\n

The SCOM: working to make government richer, more powerful and more stupid for over 150 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court of Minnesota (hereafter referred to as SCOM)\u00a0says “didn’t actually drive drunk?\u00a0 Tough\u00a0– \u00a0W your wife did, so the police get a shiny new Tahoe!“. An “innocent owner” cannot avoid forfeiture of a vehicle when it is jointly owned with the offender in the case, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled in a split […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime-and-punishment","category-liberty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7295"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7299,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7295\/revisions\/7299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}