STATES ARE FINALLY REVOKING COPS' LICENSE TO STEAL

A RECENT FLURRY OF LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITY SUGGESTS WHY FORFEITURE REFORM SUCCEEDS—AND WHY IT FAILS.

- JACOB SULLUM

WHEN COPS INVADED Ginnifer Hency’s home in Smiths Creek, Michigan, they seized TV sets, ladders, her children’s cellphones and iPads, even her vibrator. “They took everything,” she told state legislators a year later. The July 2014 raid turned up six ounces of marijuana.

Hency, a mother of four with multiple sclerosis, was using marijuana for pain relief based on her neurologist’s recommendation, as allowed by Michigan law at the time. She also served as a state-registered caregiver for five other medical marijuana patients. So after the cops arrested her for possessing marijuana with the intent to sell it, a St. Clair County judge dismissed the charges. But when Hency asked about getting her property back, she recalled, “The prosecutor came out to me and said, ‘Well, I can still beat you in civil court. I can still take your stuff.’” When she heard that, Hency said, “I was at a loss. I literally just sat there dumbfounded.”

Annette Shattuck, another medical marijuana patient who was raided by the St. Clair County Drug Task Force around the same time, told a similar story. “After they breached the door at gunpoint with masks, they proceeded to take every belonging in my house,” she testified at the same hearing. The cops’ haul included bicycles, her husband’s tools, a lawn mower, a weed trimmer, her children’s Christmas presents, $85 in cash from her daughter’s birthday cards, the kids’ car seats and soccer equipment, and vital documents such as driver’s licenses, insurance cards, and birth certificates.