LastWeekTonight
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 13 months, 2014–2024
16:30 · 16M views · Oct 6, 2014
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on civil asset forfeiture, the process by which police can seize property they suspect is tied to crime. It explains how the property itself is put on trial and how departments profit.
HN treats it as the standard accessible explainer on civil forfeiture, linked in nearly every thread about police seizures.
20 comments from Hacker News
Civil asset forfeiture is wild shit. John Oliver had a great episode on it: this video They make criminal accusations against your property and not against you, and because of that, you have no rights or recourse. This is just blatant nonsense under the US legal system, but that's kind of irrelevant. Civil forfeiture was introduced to take houses and cars from drug dealers as part of the War on Drugs, which was really started as war on minorities and hippies. The government wants to take stuff from drug dealers, so it gets to do it (see legal realism: [LINK] ).
Civil forfeiture is really screwed up [1]. >So he basically loses them before he even can prove that they are his or not? Yes goods are guilty until proven innocent in court. >It seems to be a big loophole for the government to just go and steal whatever they want from you, before you've been proven guilty. It kinda is. Watch the link. [1] this video
John Oliver did a great job explaining the problem this week on his show. Basically, Kane and Nestor might be innocent, but their money is on trial separately, as dumb as that sounds. this video
It's true, its un-american, and here's a video from John Oliver so you can learn more about this ongoing heinous practice the police use to prey on the poor and defenseless. this video
This is John Oliver's commentary on this issue. this video note: Not sure if we can post youtube videos here, but the commentary on the video very relevant to the topic