Pubdate: Thu, 10 Jan 2002
Source: Associated Press (Wire)
Copyright: 2002 Associated Press
Author: Gina Holland (AP)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/af.htm (Asset Forfeiture)

SUPREME COURT REJECTS INMATE APPEAL

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed the way the FBI notifies 
prisoners about plans to seize their property.

The court rejected a jailed drug offender's arguments that paperwork should 
be delivered to federal prisons and signed for by the inmate.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who wrote the 5-4 decision, said 
"heroic efforts" are not required to get notice to inmates.

Larry Dean Dusenbery had claimed his constitutional rights were violated 
because he did not receive a letter the FBI sent by certified mail to 
prison notifying him of plans to confiscate his car and about $22,000 in cash.

"Today's decision diminishes the safeguard of notice, affording an 
opportunity to be heard, before one is deprived of property," Justice Ruth 
Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissent, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, 
David H. Souter and Stephen Breyer.

An inmate "receives his mail only through the combined good offices of two 
bureaucracies which he can neither monitor nor control," the Postal Service 
and the Bureau of Prisons, Ginsburg wrote.

Federal prison officials have changed procedures to ensure inmates get 
their government-related mail, Ginsburg wrote, and "the new rules show that 
substantial improvements in reliability could have been had, in 1988 and 
years before, at minimal expense and inconvenience."

Dusenbery's case turned on the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that property 
will not be seized without "due process."

Rehnquist said he was unmoved by arguments that the government controlled 
Dusenbery's whereabouts and should have been able to get mail to him.

"'Undoubtedly, the government could make a special effort in any case (just 
as it did in the movie "Saving Private Ryan") to assure that a particular 
piece of mail reaches a particular individual who is in one way or another 
in the custody of the government," Rehnquist wrote.

The chief justice said those efforts are not required.

Dusenbery, of Ohio, pleaded guilty to drug and gun charges in 1986 and went 
to a federal prison in Michigan. Dusenbery contends the cash and car that 
were confiscated were not drug profits.

Dusenbery had also lost in federal court and before the 6th U.S. Circuit 
Court of Appeals.

The case is Dusenbery v. United States, 00-6567.
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