The plaintiff Toyota Lease Trust owns vehicles it leases to individuals. One of plaintiff’s lessees ran up $1000 in unpaid parking tickets and the Village of Freeport seized the vehicle under its Scofflaw law. The seizure violated the owner’s Fourth Amendment rights. The village also deprived plaintiff of Fourteenth Amendment due process rights by the lack of notice of seizure. Toyota Lease Trust v. Vill. of Freeport, 2023 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 12329 (E.D.N.Y. Jan. 24, 2023):
Applying these standards, the Court concludes that Freeport’s Scofflaw policy as applied in this case violated Plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights as a matter of law. Defendant seized the Vehicle pursuant to its Scofflaw policy and failed to obtain a warrant for the seizure. Further, the Village offers no exception to the warrant requirement, and the Court determines that none applies here. While Freeport contends that the Vehicle had an expired registration sticker displayed, no insurance code was on file, and that it had been deemed abandoned and was blocking traffic, it does not dispute that the Vehicle was located and impounded pursuant to its Scofflaw policy. Def. Mem. at 6; Def. 56.1 ¶¶ 15-16. Further, the February 5, 2020 ticket for an expired registration would not have been issued if the car had not been located using the LPR system under the Scofflaw procedures, and an expired registration sticker similarly does not lead to an appropriate warrantless seizure. Finally, the expired registration ticket was paid on or about March 3, 2020, Pl. Counter ¶ 13, meaning Freeport’s continued retention after that date—which is prior to when Freeport sent a letter to Toyota on March 25, 2020—did not relate to the Vehicle’s registration sticker and/or insurance. This continued retention, therefore, is a separate Fourth Amendment violation. As a result, no material facts are in dispute as to Freeport’s warrantless seizure and seven-month retention of the Vehicle establishing a constitutional deprivation under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, as the Village admits, the seizure was carried out pursuant to its Scofflaw policy, which establishes the second element for the Section 1983 claim. Accordingly, the Court concludes that summary judgment in favor of Plaintiff on liability is warranted as to its Fourth Amendment cause of action.
On the due process claim:
Applying these standards, the Court determines that Freeport’s actions violated Toyota’s Fourteenth Amendment due process rights, again as a matter of law. Freeport seized the Vehicle prior to providing any notice to Toyota. When it did provide notice, it was untimely as the letter sent 49 days after impounding the vehicle, and it was deficient as it failed to provide an opportunity for a hearing. Def. 56.1 ¶¶ 13-14, 26; see also Pl. Mem. Ex. M. Even if All County provided notice via letter five days after it impounded the Vehicle, it did not provide opportunity for a hearing, and as Freeport admits, All County did not have authority to release the Vehicle pursuant to its towing agreement with the Village. Def. 56.1 ¶¶ 12, 40-45; see Pl. Mem. Ex. D. Applying the Matthews factors, Plaintiff’s property interests in the Vehicle outweighs Freeport’s interest in collecting fines, and the undisputed lack of hearing requirement under the Scofflaw policy violates due process. As a result, Toyota has established a constitutional deprivation by failing to provide timely notice and a hearing before a neutral decisionmaker to review the warrantless seizure. Furthermore, Toyota has sufficiently established that the Scofflaw policy and the Village’s deficient notice caused this constitutional deprivation satisfying the second element for this Section 1983 claim. Accordingly, the Court concludes that summary judgment in favor of Plaintiff is warranted as to its Fourteenth Amendment due process claim.
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)