Police seize woman's car for $20 in drugs, she wins pyrrhic victory in court

quote:

---

For nearly three years, Linda Ross, 26, has been fighting the seizure of her vehicle, which police took after finding a small amount of marijuana inside. It's a legal battle that's dragged on long after Ross learned that cops in Westland, Michigan, had already sold her 2007 Ford Focus, even though she was still in the process of appealing to get it back.

A police officer first seized the car in January 2013, when Ross says he pulled her over after a shift delivering pizzas and found her in possession of a gram of weed. She couldn't believe it when the officer told her he was going to impound her vehicle over it.

"It felt like a nightmare -- like I was actually being kidnapped and robbed," she told The Huffington Post. "It was so shocking to see that he was taking my car so fast. Within a minute or two, he literally drove it away. He radioed in an officer and he came down and they drove it away."

---

quote:

---

Last week, Ross finally received some satisfaction, when a Michigan court of appeals found that police were wrong to take her car in the first place, overturning a previous decision that had approved its forfeiture. The judges, however, didn't rule in Ross' favor because it seems outrageous to seize someone's car simply because it was used to buy a gram of weed. Instead, they said it was how Ross got the marijuana that made all the difference.

In a 2-1 decision, the majority wrote that because a customer had supposedly given Ross the weed as a tip for a pizza delivery -- and that she hadn't actually driven her car with the intent of purchasing drugs -- the vehicle wasn't subject to forfeiture.

---