STATES ARE FINALLY REVOKING COPS’ LICENSE TO STEAL
WHEN COPS INVADED Ginnifer Hency’s home in Smiths Creek, Michigan, they seized TV sets, ladders, her children’s cellphones and iPads, even her vibrator. “They took everything,” she told state legislators a year later. The July 2014 raid turned up six ounces of marijuana.
Hency, a mother of four with multiple sclerosis, was using marijuana for pain relief based on her neurologist’s recommendation, as allowed by Michigan law at the time. She also served as a state-registered caregiver for five other medical marijuana patients. So after the cops arrested her for possessing marijuana with the intent to sell it, a St. Clair County judge dismissed the charges. But when Hency asked about getting her property back, she recalled, “The prosecutor came out to me and said, ‘Well, I can still beat you in civil court. I can still take your stuff.’” When she heard that, Hency said, “I was at a loss. I literally just sat there dumbfounded.”
Annette Shattuck, another medical marijuana patient who was raided by the St. Clair County Drug Task Force around the same time, told a similar story. “After they breached the door at gunpoint with masks, they proceeded to take every belonging in my house,” she testified at the same hearing. The cops’ haul included bicycles, her husband’s tools, a lawn mower, a weed trimmer, her children’s Christmas presents, $85 in cash from her daughter’s birthday cards, the kids’ car seats and soccer equipment, and vital documents such as driver’s licenses, insurance cards, and birth certificates.
“How do you explain to your kids when they come home and everything is gone?” Shattuck asked. She added that her 9-year-old daughter was now afraid of the police and “cried for weeks” because the cops threatened to shoot the family dog during the raid. Although “my husband and I have not been convicted of any crime,” Shattuck said, they could not get their property back, and their bank accounts remained frozen.
Stories like these, which highlighted the petty, cruel, moneygrubbing behavior encouraged by a system that allows police to take property allegedly tainted by crime, helped inspire Michigan legislators to change the civil asset forfeiture laws that created this license to steal. In 2015, they raised the standard of proof in civil forfeiture cases involving drugs or “nuisances” such as gambling and prostitution, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence,” the more-likely-than-not rule that had previously applied. They also required law enforcement agencies to report “all seizure and forfeiture activities” every year and indicate whether the property owners had
