Comment by Jtsummers
1 day ago
It may be preferable to lose your property in exchange for not getting arrested, but that's like saying I'd rather get pickpocketed than beaten and robbed. Most people would rather their legal property remain their legal property.
Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
> Obviously. Hence the purpose of civil forfeiture, to discourage violations of the law. Civil forfeiture is a potential consequence of doing pickpocketing, beatings, and robbery, to keep to your example. Criminal fines are meant for after all the illicit money has been seized, they're meant to come out of their McDonalds paycheck not their robbery proceeds. Otherwise fines are useless against criminals who profit from their crimes.
Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
Are you ignorant or a troll? This isn't an either/or situation of course. You could also be an ignorant troll.
> Are you ignorant or a troll? … You could also be an ignorant troll.
I'm a significant Wikipedian, so maybe.
> Are you really conflating civil asset forfeiture, where no person is convicted of a crime but their property is seized and not returned, with criminal fines which are imposed after a conviction?
No. They are independent and serve different purposes. Criminal fines are meant to be taken against legally possessed assets. When someone steals $10 million dollars, the $10 million dollars is seized via civil asset forfeiture. Hence when National Propaganda Radio reports some white collar criminal was fined $10,000 dollars for stealing $10 million dollars, what they're not telling you is that the $10 million dollars is going to be seized via a civil judicial process, regardless of any criminal judicial process. Otherwise it's easy to be confused when white collar criminals almost always get fines less than they stole. All criminals would have to do is steal more than the maximum fine, and NPR happily lets massive amounts of leftists think so.
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