[She charged] a flat fee for 90-minute “dates” with women between the ages of 23 and 55 whom she termed independent contractors.
The women signed contracts agreeing not to engage in illegal activity, including having sex for money, Palfrey says, and were given guidelines on the difference between legal and illegal sexual behavior. At least one woman, Dr. Paula Neble, is known to have told federal prosecutors that she had sex for money while working for Palfrey. Palfrey is suing her for breach of contract.
You can't make this stuff up, folks.
Facing racketeering charges, Palfrey’s assets were seized and she has since offered to sell her supposedly "upscale" (which in D.C. can only mean politically powerful) client list to the highest bidder to raise money. Needless to say, the powers that be have sought to stop the sale. She has also filed a motion seeking a half million dollars, presumably from her seized assets, to pay for her defense.
Fat chance. One more increasingly widespread government abuse, thanks largely to the idiotic War On Drugs, has been the now almost routine seizure of a criminal defendant’s assets, the prosecution claiming such assets are both evidence of the crime charged and the “fruits” of that alleged crime and, as such, should not be available to defendants to pay for their defense. The burden of proof in the far more widely used civil forfeiture actions is significantly lower than the usual criminal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
The rationale behind forfeiture has a sort of facial plausibility about it. One wouldn’t, for example, expect a person charged with bank robbery and found to have a hundred thousand dollars in his possession the source of which he could not otherwise account for to be permitted to spend that money on his defense.
Aside from the underlying principle that it shouldn’t be criminal for willing adults to sell sexual services in the first place, I have no position as to the likely outcome of Palfrey’s case. It may well turn out that, strictly as a matter of law, she is eventually found guilty as charged, that a sufficient showing that the money seized was indeed the fruit of that illegal activity and that she therefore has no legal entitlement to it.
Regardless, the fundamental principle of criminal law is that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty. What is more, it is the burden of the government to prove each and every element of the crime charged beyond a reasonable doubt. Whatever other arguments there may be in their favor, civil and so-called administrative forfeiture laws not only serve to undermine that burden, they add further to the overwhelming disparity of resources available as between the state, on the one hand, and the defendant, on the other. The state has virtually limitless resources; all but the wealthiest of defendants has, by comparison, vastly less. That is, in fact, a significant part of the rationale behind requiring a very high burden of proof on the state.
Step by step, inch by inch, we have witnessed, nay, permitted the erosion of civil and criminal rights and liberties in this nation, first, to protect us from the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of illegal drugs and now from the grotesquely exaggerated dangers of terrorism. Every incremental increase in power and control over our lives we have ceded to the state has only whetted its appetite for even greater power and control. The proliferation of civil asset forfeiture actions, routinely used not only in drug cases but in tax disputes with the IRS and now even in such dire threats to the survival of the republic as escort service “racketeering” only goes to prove the point. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, any state powerful enough to offer everything it convinces you that you need is far more likely to end up taking everything you have.
Oh, and the answer to the title question is that a prostitute will stop screwing you once you’re dead.
2 comments:
DAR, sorry to hear that inactivist has died, I very much enjoyed it prior to the crash.
From a legal sense, what gives the government the right to seize assets prior to conviction? Why hasn't this been overturned? As you point out, it seems like "sentence first, verdict afterwards."
Hi Stuart! Yes, I'm sorry Inactivist ultimately lived up to its name, too.
As to your question, the answer is unfortunately very complicated. If you want a more thorough answer, you might try the Cato article to which I have since linked in the post. More briefly, however, it goes back to the common law the U.S. inherited from England and a couple of fairly complicated legal distinctions, the first being the procedural and evidentiary differences be a civil action and a criminal action. It is only in the latter that a presumption of innocence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt is required. Most forfeiture cases are civil forfeitures, although since 1970 criminal forfeitures have also been a tool available to prosecutors.
The second, more esoteric difference is between in personam action and in rem jurisdiction. In the latter, an action against property or things, themselves, takes place -- by way of legal fiction the things themselves are parties to the legal action. In that sense, the putative owner of the property is not, himself, in jeopardy.
I say 'putative' because, again by long legal tradition, the "fruits of crime" are not and cannot be the legal property of the criminal. Moreover, even property legally acquired that was used as an "instrument" of the crime thus become "tainted" and susceptible of forfeiture.
My understanding, based on a very brief look, is that the courts, including the Supreme Court, have generally upheld these doctrines as they apply to forfeiture cases. There was some legislative reform in 2000 at the federal level, but forfeiture remains an extremely powerful and, I believe, frequently abused tool of both federal and state prosecutors.
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