On Thursday, a panel of federal judges at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals will be asked whether the FBI's brazen smash-and-grab scheme that netted more than $86 million in forfeited cash and property violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the raid's innocent victims.
The agents were tasked with cataloging the contents of the boxes, but they also
seized piles of valuables—gold coins, luxury watches, family heirlooms, and stacks of cash—from people who had not been charged with any crimes.
And they did that despite being told, by
the warrant authorizing the raid, that the contents of the safe deposit boxes were off-limits.
"The fundamental principle at stake is that if the government wants to search and seize your property, it has to have some reason to think you did something wrong," Rob Johnson, an attorney with the Institute for Justice (IJ) and one of the lawyers who will argue the case before the circuit court on Thursday,
wrote this week on Twitter. "The FBI came up with a blatant scheme to circumvent that fundamental principle, and, so far, no court has held them to account."
There's ample evidence showing that the FBI's "dual motive" was part of the scheme from the beginning. As
Reason has
previously detailed, the warrant for the raid explicitly forbade law enforcement from seizing or searching the private property contained in the safe deposit boxes held at U.S. Private Vaults, which was the target of the FBI's investigation. During
depositions, FBI agents admitted that they planned to forfeit cash and other valuables from the boxes,
even though they
did not include those plans in the warrant application.
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