Poor Mojo's Newswire

In this latest case, a Monterey police officer took $22,000 off the driver -- even though he had committed no crime. "You live in the United States, you think you have rights -- and apparently you don't," said George Reby. As a professional insurance adjuster, Reby spends a lot of time traveling from state to state. But it was on a trip to a conference in Nashville last January that he got a real education in Tennessee justice. "I never had any clue that they thought they could take my money legally," Reby added. "I didn't do anything wrong." Reby was driving down Interstate 40, heading west through Putnam County, when he was stopped for speeding. A Monterey police officer wanted to know if he was carrying any large amounts of cash. "I said, 'Around $20,000,'" he recalled. "Then, at the point, he said, 'Do you mind if I search your vehicle?' I said, 'No, I don't mind.' I certainly didn't feel I was doing anything wrong. It was my money." That's when Officer Larry Bates confiscated the cash based on his suspicion that it was drug money. . . . He said that, while police are required to get a judge to sign off on a seizure within five days, state law says that hearing "shall be ex parte" -- meaning only the officer's side can be heard. That's why George Reby was never told that there was a hearing on his case. "It wouldn't have mattered because the judge would have said, 'This says it shall be ex parte. Sit down and shut up. I'm not to hear from you -- by statute," Miles added. . . .

A new report by the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project of Michigan and Northwestern law schools, chronicles over 2000 cases where a person convicted of a crime was later exonerated between 1989 and 2012. More than half of these exonerated persons “were cleared since 1995 in 13 ‘group exonerations,’ that occurred after it was discovered that police officers had deliberately framed dozens or hundreds of innocent defendants, mostly for drug and gun crimes.” Perhaps most distressingly, however, 101 of the exonerated individuals were convicted of murder and sentenced to die — nearly all of whom spent years or even decades behind bars before their criminal conviction was eventually overturned.