Plaintiffs had money in safe deposit boxes at United States Private Vaults. The government raided the boxes apparently with probable cause and seized the money pending forfeiture, but it offers no justification for the seizure or continuing to keep the money. Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction for return of the property under Rule 41(g) is granted because they show a likelihood of success on the merits and irreparable harm. Snitko v. United States, 2021 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 140280 (C.D.Cal. July 23, 2021):
What the FBI Notice does not contain is any specific factual or legal justification for the Government’s retention of the $57,000 that Ruiz asserts is his. Nor does the Government offer any justification for its continued retention of the $57,000 other than that “the cash is the subject of the pending in rem administrative forfeiture proceedings.” It has been 123 days and counting since the Government seized Box 7622. Whether the Government’s initial seizure of Box 7622 on March 22, 2021 violated Ruiz’s constitutional rights is a question for another day. Whether the Government is justified in its continued seizure of the cash is the question at the heart of Ruiz’s Motion.
The Court now addresses this question through the frame of the preliminary injunction factors enumerated in Winter. As discussed below, the Court finds that the facts and the law clearly favor Ruiz as to his Fourth Amendment claim
Ruiz Has Demonstrated a Likelihood of Success on the Merits
. . .
Assuming that the Government’s initial seizure of Box 7622 was justified by probable cause and conducted pursuant to a valid warrant, the Government has nonetheless failed to provide any justification for its continued seizure of the property. Why has the Government kept the $57,000 now that Ruiz has come forward and sworn under penalty of perjury that it is his? The Government doesn’t really say. Instead, the Government states that it continues to seize Ruiz’s property because “the cash is the subject of … pending in rem administrative forfeiture proceedings.” This explanation is not a justification. Merely stating that the Government has initiated forfeiture proceedings against the property does not offer any insight into how the Government’s continued retention of the $57,000 complies with the dictates of the Fourth Amendment.
Ruiz Has Demonstrated a Likelihood of Irreparable Harm
“It is will established that the deprivation of constitutional rights ‘unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”‘ Melendres v. Arpaio, 695 F.3d 990, 1002 (9th Cir. 2012) (quoting Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373, 96 S. Ct. 2673, 49 L. Ed. 2d 547 (1976)). The Government seized Box 7622 on March 22, 2021 and Ruiz filed a claim with the FBI to retrieve his seized property on April 8, 2021. To date, 106 days after Ruiz asked the FBI for his property back, the Government has neither returned the $57,000 nor provided an adequate justification for the prolonged seizure. Ruiz will therefore likely continue to suffer injury to his Fourth Amendment rights for the foreseeable future if an injunction does not issue.
Equally troubling is the fact that Ruiz “desperately need[s] to have [his] money returned” because he is “currently unemployed, and [] had been living off the funds in [his] USPV box prior to the seizure.” Ruiz testifies that he needs the money because he “cannot pay for food” and is “currently living off canned foods and other provisions that [he] stockpiled at the beginning of the pandemic.” He further testifies that without the $57,000, Ruiz “cannot pay for needed medical care including physical therapy for [his] back and finger.”
Ruiz needs the money to pay for medical care and food. The Government does not challenge this testimony, or even address it. Ruiz has therefore established that without a preliminary injunction requiring the Government to return the property, he is likely to suffer irreparable harm via his inability to pay for food and needed medical treatment for an indeterminate period of time.
Ruiz Has Established that the Balance of Equities Favors Injunctive Relief and an Injunction Would Be in the Public Interest
by John Wesley Hall
Criminal Defense Lawyer and
Search and seizure law consultant
Little Rock, Arkansas
Contact: forhall @ aol.com / The Book www.johnwesleyhall.com
"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced."
—Williams
v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold,
J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws,
or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp
v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that
bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the
police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater
than it is today."
— Terry
v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their
property."
—Entick
v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have
frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And
so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his
case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth
Amendment."
—United
States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated
here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth."
—Chapman
v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the
bottom of a turntable."
—Arizona
v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly
exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth
Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in
an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected."
—Katz
v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to
protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born
to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men
of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
—United
States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted
intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by
government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose
it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.”
—United
States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want /
But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need."
—Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
"In Germany, they first came for the communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for
the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came
for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration
camp]
“You know, most men would get discouraged by
now. Fortunately for you, I am not most men!”
---Pepé Le Pew
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers,
is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which
reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that
those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being
judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting
out crime."
—Johnson
v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
