Sixth Circuit Denies Immunity To Officers Who Waited 19 Months To Process A $30k Forfeiture
This case involves both civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. First one, then the other. Not that the order matters as much as the government's unwillingness to do much more than sit on the $30,000 in cash they took from an Ohio couple during a supposed drug investigation.
Civil forfeiture allows the government to keep seized property without even bothering to prove a criminal case in court. All the government usually needs to do is claim the stuff it took was the result of criminal activity. Criminal forfeiture is tied to criminal charges. It's much harder to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, which is why the government prefers civil forfeiture to criminal forfeiture.
Like most forfeitures, this saga began with a pretextual traffic stop. From the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals decision [PDF]:
In early 2018, Chillicothe detectives investigated and surveilled plaintiffs, believing they were part of a large drug trafficking operation. On January 10, 2018, Chillicothe police stopped James for a traffic violation, and officers seized his cell phone and $1,080 in cash. When Nicolette arrived at the scene, they seized her cell phone and an additional $715. Officers then obtained and executed a search warrant for their home, which authorized a search for not only evidence of drug crimes, but currency, financial records, and communication devices. They did not find any drugs or paraphernalia, but discovered and seized $33,715 in cash and various personal property.
One car, one home, and two people searched. No drugs. Just cash, which the PD helped itself to. Then... it did nothing for an exceedingly long time.
Their property was seized in January 2018. For the next several months, the couple repeatedly demanded their property be returned. The PD refused, claiming the property was essential to its ongoing investigation." Finally, in November, the PD submitted its case to the prosecutor... who then did nothing for several more months.
It wasn't until June 2019 - 17 months after the seizure and after the couple filed a lawsuit in federal court - that the prosecutor bothered trying to bring a criminal case to a grand jury. The only offense the indictment listed was receiving proceeds of an offense subject to forfeiture proceedings." The PD had already assumed the seized cash was guilty despite finding no evidence of drug possession or drug dealing. The prosecutor simply closed the loop by turning that unproven assumption into a criminal accusation.
The lower court found in favor of the couple and their constitutional rights.
[I]n October 2019, the district court granted plaintiffs' request for a preliminary injunction.
The court noted that it was at a loss to comprehend the state's failure to file in a timely manner
civil forfeiture or request forfeiture in the first indictment." It declared defendants' actions unconstitutional and ordered the return of property seized during the execution of a search warrant on January 10, 2018." James's pending state charges were dismissed in November 2020. In March 2021, defendants returned the cash to plaintiffs' counsel.
The government (personified by the prosecutor and involved officers) may have felt this was good enough. No conviction was obtained but the couple got their stuff back, but likely only because a court ordered the return. Had it not been for the lawsuit, there's a good chance the PD would still be in control of this property.
And there's a good chance the government hoped the very belated return of property it never bothered to properly forfeit would convince the couple to drop their lawsuit. But the officers and the prosecutor were forced back into the action due to the lower court's denial of immunity.
The prosecutor asked for absolute immunity because his screwing around was related to his prosecutorial functions." Unbelievably, the involved officers asked for the same thing, claiming their refusal to move forward with a forfeiture was just them helping the prosecutor out with his prosecutorial functions."
Oh my no, says the Appeals Court. First off, the baseline is qualified immunity. For both sets of defendants. That includes the prosecutor, who seemed really sure absolute immunity would let him off the hook.
Absolute immunity is the exception rather than the rule." Spurlock, 330 F.3d at 796 (citation and brackets omitted). We generally assume that qualified, not absolute, immunity is
sufficient to protect a government actor. Id. So [t]he official seeking absolute immunity bears
the burden of showing that such immunity is justified for the function in question." Buckley v. Fitzsimmons, 509 U.S. 259, 269 (1993) (citation omitted). It does not matter that defendants are police officers, rather than prosecutors, because we use a functional approach" to determine whether officials are entitled to absolute immunity, which looks to the nature of the function performed, not the identity of the actor who performed it."
No absolute immunity for the cops:
In defendants' view, if prosecutors are entitled to absolute immunity for their professional evaluation of the evidence assembled by the police," Buckley, 509 U.S. at 273, then police officers must be entitled to the same immunity when they hold the evidence (and therefore facilitate the prosecutor's evaluation). More specifically, they contend that once their investigation was complete and they were just holding the evidence pending a prosecutorial decision, the possession became a prosecutorial function. We cannot agree.
Defendants never evaluated the evidence; they merely held it-a fact they admitted to the district court, calling their actions ministerial." Nor did they do any advocacy, which is the critical inquiry." Holloway, 220 F.3d at 775 (citation omitted). Absent that, we see no actions related to the judicial process-let alone ones that are intimately associated with the judicial phase of the criminal process." Thus, defendants are not entitled to absolute immunity.
No qualified immunity either. There's precedent in this circuit: a case that involved a much shorter delay (six months) than the 19 months in this case.
At this stage, Baumholtz is directly on point. The district court made two findings of fact crucial to this conclusion: it found that the delay in this case was 19 months and 6 days (the period between the January 10, 2018, seizure and the August 16, 2019, indictment), and that Defendants have offered no credible explanation for the latter half of the 19-month delay." Indeed, plaintiffs' case is even stronger than Baumholtz's-the delay is nearly four times as long (first factor), and they timely sought return of their property multiple" times and filed a replevin action" (third factor). Accordingly, under Baumholtz, reasonable officers would have known that plaintiffs had been unlawfully deprived of their property.
Reasonable officers would have known." These ones probably did. Like the prosecutor, they didn't care how long it took to get around to effecting the forfeiture because all the property belonged to someone else. And now they're going to have to show up in court to defend actions the lower court has already ruled unconstitutional, rather than hide behind a wall of immunity.
The lesson here is: if you're going to steal stuff from citizens, do it faster. Otherwise, you're just asking to get sued.