{"id":4718,"date":"2010-11-29T07:44:13","date_gmt":"2010-09-30T06:40:58","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-09-30T06:40:58","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=4718","title":{"rendered":"CA7: CPD arcane forfeiture processes violate due process"},"content":{"rendered":"

The City of Chicago\u2019s forfeiture processes violate due process. The rules are arcane, obscure, and hard to find, and people who actually try to follow them are essentially thwarted by the CPD\u2019s rules and failure to tell people how to do anything. Also, the City sends forfeiture notices to the residences of people in jail, and refuses to check the jail records to see if any of the notices returned involved people in jail. Gates v. City of Chicago<\/a>, 623 F.3d 389 (7th Cir. 2010)*:<\/p>\n

The plaintiffs claim that forty percent of Pollard notices mailed are returned to the police department undelivered. The City does not wish to bear the expense of the additional search of the Sheriff’s website and a possible second mailing because the amounts at issue are so small. But the City expects claimants to repeatedly return to the police station for instructions and for the elusive hunt for the arresting officer’s signature on the Form 54, in order to reclaim those same small amounts. And the Pollard letter is not simply notice but also the means by which arrestees may reclaim their money. The predictable result is that millions of dollars remain unclaimed in the City’s coffers each year. We cannot conclude on this record that arrestees are willingly abandoning millions of dollars; it is just as likely that they do not claim their money because they do not know how or because they have not received a Pollard notice or because the City has made the process obtuse and unreasonably difficult. It is more likely that arrestees do not know how to retrieve their money because the City’s notice is misleading and, in a certain class of cases, is not reasonably calculated to reach its target. The district court was premature in holding that the inventory receipt Notice was adequate, and in finding that no more than the initial Pollard mailing to the address listed on the inventory receipt was required for narcotics arrestees. The court should also have considered the City’s knowledge that a predictable number of arrestees would not be home, and should have weighed the practicability of checking the Sheriff’s website and making a second mailing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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