In addition to being ultra-conservative about gays and women, and having some dubious racial opinions, he's a big believer in civil asset forfeiture (a/k/a "the police think you maybe are a drug dealer, or at least you have a really nice car, so they take your money and your car but never file charges and, oh, they get to keep the money and the car"). This kind of thing has come under a lot more fire in the past several years, and (on a federal level) seemed to be finally out of favor. Jeff Sessions thinks it's a fine idea …
… and he'll be in charge of federal law enforcement.
Sessions is Very Upset by Challenges to Civil Asset Forfeiture – Dispatches From the Culture Wars
George Will has one of his occasionally intelligent columns, this time about Jeff Sessions, Trump’s nominee to be the next attorney general. You know what really gets Sessions upset? Anyone who challenges the blatantly unconstitutional practice of civil asset forfeiture. There might somewhere be a second prominent American who endorses today’s civil forfeiture practices, but [Read More…]
I was talking about this with a lawyer the other day, who said that civil asset forfeiture was unconstitutional, as per several Supreme Court rulings, and she would personally enjoy taking on a CAF case.
+John Bump SCOTUS rulings on civil asset forfeiture are not nearly as clearcut as your lawyer acquaintance suggests. While the Court has put some bounds around it (e.g., assets cannot be frozen that keep the defendant from hiring a lawyer, in Luis v United States (2016) [https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/15pdf/14-419_nmip.pdf], the basic principles of civil asset forfeiture have passed SCOTUS scrutiny on multiple occasions.
http://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-constitutionality-of-civil-forfeiture provides some (to a layman) sound arguments as to the constitutionality of CAF.
I was afraid of that.
Hm. I'll point her at this. She is very rarely and very quietly on G+.
+John Bump I would love to hear otherwise, but SCOTUS has had this ball kicked to them a lot of times without making a blanket ruling. The answer seems to be political, not judicial.
Session's attitude on this (and other things) strikes me as a pretty classic conservative Law & Order one: that to come to the attention of the police as a suspect is tantamount to being considered guilty, that the police make no mistakes, or that if mistakes are made it is necessary so as to ensure that no guilty go unpunished.
Doesn't bode well.