Houston will drop your charges after illegal LEO activity, but they'll keep your property

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Even in cases that hinged on the trustworthiness of demonstrably untrustworthy cops, The Houston Chronicle reports, prosecutors so far have chosen to keep nearly all of the property seized from defendants. That striking contradiction illustrates the lax rules governing civil asset forfeiture, which allows police and prosecutors to pad their budgets by confiscating allegedly crime-tainted property.

The Chronicle identified "three dozen instances in recent years in which an indicted member of the Squad 15 narcotics unit swore to the facts used to justify a search leading to a cash or vehicle confiscation." The loot, collected over a five-year period, included about $75,000 in cash and several cars. "Records show some or all of the money confiscated during the busts was returned in five cases," the Chronicle reports, "typically after defendants hired lawyers to challenge the forfeitures." But the county has kept the rest of the money and the cars, even though prosecutors consider the evidence that led to the seizures unreliable because it was offered by cops with a record of making stuff up.

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The Texas Supreme Court underlined that distinction in 2016, when it concluded that the exclusionary rule, which bars the admission of illegally obtained evidence, does not apply to civil actions under Chapter 59, a state law authorizing "forfeiture of contraband."

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The lead plaintiffs in the proposed class action are a Mississippi couple, Ameal Woods and Jordan Davis, who were robbed of $42,300 after they were pulled over by sheriff's deputies on Interstate 10 in May 2019. Woods and Davis were on their way to Houston, where Woods planned to spend the money on a tractor and a trailer for his trucking business. The deputies ostensibly stopped them because they were following another vehicle too closely, although Woods, who was driving, was not cited for that alleged offense. Instead, the cops made off with the couple's life savings.

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The forfeiture petition claimed a drug-detecting dog alerted to the money. But no such dog was present during the stop, which means this alleged canine inspection must have occurred after the deputies already had seized the cash, supposedly based on probable cause to believe it was related to illegal activity. Research has found that as much as 90 percent of U.S. currency carries traces of cocaine, which therefore hardly counts as evidence that the current owner is involved in drug dealing.

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