Legal News

Chicago Trib: Use Caution While Driving Through Tenaha, Texas

By Ashby Jones

Folks in Chicagoland were greeted in their morning Tribunes with a riveting story about a strange alleged operation going on in Tenaha, Tex., a “dusty fleck of a town” near the Texas-Louisiana border.

According to the story, police officers in Tenaha have made a practice of stripping motorists, many of whom are African-American and just passing through, of their property without ever charging them with a crime.

Court records report it happened to more than 140 people between June 2006 and June 2008. Among them were a black woman from Akron, Ohio, who surrendered $4,000 in cash after Tenaha police pulled her over, and an interracial couple from Houston, who gave up more than $6,000 after police threatened to seize their children and put them into foster care. Neither the woman nor the couple were charged with any crime.

Officials in Tenaha call the search-and-seizure practice a legitimate use of the state’s asset-forfeiture law, a law which permits local police agencies to keep drug money and other property used in the commission of a crime and add the proceeds to their budgets.

Not surprisingly, civil rights attorneys see it differently. According to a federal class-action suit designed to stop the activity (link not available), Tenaha officials “have developed an illegal ’stop and seize’ practice of targeting, stopping, detaining, searching and often seizing property from apparently non-white citizens and those traveling with non-white citizens.”

David Guillory, an attorney in Nacogdoches who filed the federal lawsuit, said he combed through Shelby County court records from 2006 to 2008 and discovered nearly 200 cases in which Tenaha police seized cash and property from motorists. In about 50 of the cases, suspects were charged with drug possession.

But in 147 others, Guillory said the court records showed, police seized cash, jewelry, cell phones and sometimes even automobiles from motorists but never found any contraband or charged them with any crime. All but one of them were black.

“The whole thing is disproportionately targeted toward minorities, particularly African-Americans,” Guillory said. “None of these people have been charged with a crime, none were engaged in anything that looked criminal. The sole factor is that they had something that looked valuable.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 10, 2009 (boomark / email).