re: Girl Does Cartwheels During Her DUI Stop, Still Gets Arrested, Kicks Cop

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A buddy of mine got 3 aggravated DUIs in 6 months in NM

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Albuquerque resident Arlene Harjo, 56, is paying off a loan for a car she doesn't have, because the city seized it for a crime it readily admits she didn't commit, under an asset forfeiture program that is supposed to be banned.

After her son was pulled over for drunk driving, Harjo became one of roughly a thousand people every year who have their car seized by the city of Albuquerque in a process heavily weighted against the property owner. But unlike the vast majority of those cases, she's not rolling over. A new lawsuit filed Wednesday in state court by Harjo and the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, argues the city's lucrative vehicle seizure program stands in direct contradiction of recently passed state laws and "is driven by a pernicious—and unconstitutional—profit incentive" that deprived Harjo of her 14th Amendment due process rights.

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Albuquerque has a particularly aggressive program to seize vehicles from drivers suspected of driving under the influence. According to the Albuquerque Journal, the city has seized 8,369 vehicles and collected more than $8.3 million in forfeiture revenues since 2010, roughly 1,000 cars a year.

"The cases I've seen are usually where parents own a car, their kid goes out and does something stupid, and then the parents end up getting their car seized," Lisa Torraco, one of the state lawmakers who sued the city, and a practicing attorney, told me in an interview earlier this year.

Which is exactly what happened to Harjo.


In April, Harjo's son Tino asked to borrow her car to take a mid-day trip to the gym. When he didn't come back that night, Harjo got worried and started calling around. The next morning, she found out Tino had driven her car to Texas to hang out with his girlfriend. On the way back, he was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving.

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