Police Hold Children Hostage, and Motorists Pay

Gary North - November 15, 2018

This is the accusation of critics of the budget-balancing program in a Texas town.

The town takes in $800,000 a year with this program. The police stop people driving through. They charge them with drug trafficking. They take their children and turn them over to Child Protective Services. Then, to get their kids back, the drivers must forfeit their money.

Is this creative budget-balancing, or what?

Documents reviewed by The Associated Press describe the extent to which children became pawns as authorities in Tenaha, a town near the Louisiana border, accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars through highway traffic stops that have since sparked a federal investigation.

“They basically said, ‘If you all want to leave without going to jail tonight and take your kids with you, then you’ll sign over your money right now,'” Jennifer Boatright, a Houston mother of two, said in an interview describing her encounter with local officials.

The town has been named in a class-action suit. The Justice Department is also investigating.

The involvement of children adds another element to a case that has especially troubled critics of civil asset forfeiture laws. Those laws allow authorities to seize cash or other property if they believe it’s linked to criminal activity, even in cases where defendants aren’t found guilty.

In two of the Tenaha incidents, authorities separated a small child from one couple pulled over in a traffic stop and threatened to do the same to another, according to case documents.

One man had to hand over $50,000. His 16-month-old son was taken from him. “Agostini asserts in the suit that authorities even denied his request to kiss the boy goodbye.”

He did get his money back after he filed suit.

In another incident in 2007, Boatright, her boyfriend and their two children were pulled over for what Washington’s report said was “driving in the left lane for over a half mile without passing and crossing over (the) white line.” Washington wrote that he searched the car because he smelled marijuana and found $6,000 in the console.

The couple was cited for money laundering and child endangerment. But they avoided going to jail and surrendering their children, ages 18 months and 12 years, by immediately agreeing to forfeit the cash, according to a court document spelling out the arrangement.

Asset forfeiture is a big deal, and it is getting bigger. If you have more than $100 in currency, you would be wise not to break any vehicle safety laws.

Wear a white shirt and tie. Look like a lawyer or someone who can hire a lawyer.

Continue reading on here.

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Published on June 5, 2012. The original is here.

Now for the follow-up.

I did not know when I wrote this article that the incident had taken place in 2009. A class action suit was the result.

Here is the background.

Tenaha is a border town that is starved for cash flow. So the mayor of Tenaha was ready, willing and able to listen to Barry Washington, in 2006, when the former state trooper of Carthage, Texas arrived and told the mayor he could solve Tenaha's cash woes with his "drug-interdiction" skills doing arrests and seizures on Highway 59.

When asked why a 2 decade veteran of the Department of Public Safety was so interested in the squalor town of Tenaha, officer Washington said he was lying in bed one night in Carthage, after leaving his old job and a light burst through the ceiling. "And it's like I'm in a trance" he said "And G-d tells me, Go to Tenaha Texas" - and that he did.

The story is here.

The trance-induced Barry Washington did well. This was reported by The New Yorker in 2013. "Barry Washington, as deputy city marshal, received a ten-thousand-dollar personal bonus from the fund." His base salary was $30,000. He needed the money, you see. Other cops were given bonuses from the fund.

From 2006 to 2008, this town collected $3 million from victims, most of whom were black or Latino.

Officer Washington made a mistake when he arrested Mrs. Boatright. She is a self-styled redneck. She sued. She got others to join her. The plaintiffs won the suit.

The judge awarded them no money.

The Wikipedia entry on the town contains a long section on this practice. It is the only famous thing the town has ever done.

In a long and frightening article in The New Yorker in 2013, the author leads with the story of Jennifer Boatright and her children.

The district attorney was right out of central casting. She moonlighted as a country-western singer.

Some useful footage turned up that involved one of their original plaintiffs, a soft-spoken man named Dale Agostini, who was born in Guyana and was the co-owner of an award-winning Caribbean restaurant in Washington, D.C., called Sweet Mango. In September, 2007, he and his fiancée had had their infant son taken from them hours after Barry Washington pulled them over for “traveling in left lane marked for passing only,” according to the police report. No evidence of drugs or other contraband was found, and neither parent had a criminal record. Even so, Washington seized a large sum of cash that Agostini, who has family in the area, said he’d brought with him to buy restaurant equipment at a local auction. Lynda Russell, the district attorney, then arrived at the scene, sending Agostini and his fiancée, a nursing student at the University of Maryland, to jail for the night.

In police surveillance footage, Agostini can be heard pleading with Russell, “Can I kiss my son goodbye?”

Afterward, Russell dryly recounted to a colleague, “I said no, kiss me.”

There is some good news.

Lynda Russell, meanwhile, has consistently refused to testify, pleading the Fifth, and declined to be interviewed. Her faith in the power of forfeiture, too, appears unshaken. After the county and the state decided not to provide her with legal representation, she asked to use the county’s forfeiture fund to finance her own defense.

I have written about fines in my book, Victim's Rights, pp. 257-58. The money should never go to the government. Otherwise, it pays the government to become corrupt. The fines should go into a fund to compensate victims of unsolved crimes -- government failures.