. Bennis v. Michigan (1996) In September 1988 a Michigan couple named John and Tina Bennis bought a 1977 Pontiac automobile for the price of $600, which they split between them. Three weeks later, on the night of October 3, John was arrested by Detroit police after picking up a prostitute in the car and later charged and convicted of gross indecency. Sensing an opportunity, the county prosecutor turned to a Michigan statute allowing for the seizure of property used for the purposes of “lewdness, assignation or prostitution” and brought an asset forfeiture action targeting the car.
Because Tina Bennis was a part owner of the car and had been convicted of no crime, she innocently assumed her right to life, liberty, and property under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment would prevent the government from robbing her of her ride. The U.S. Supreme Court saw things differently. “An owner's interest in property may be forfeited by reason of the use to which the property is put even though the owner did not know that it was to be put to such use,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist. By rejecting Bennis’ “innocent owner” defense, the Supreme Court kicked the door open to even greater asset forfeiture abuse.
reason.com
Gonzales v. Raich (2005)
According to Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, Congress possesses the power “to regulate commerce...among the several states.” Yet in the Supreme Court’s 1942 ruling in Wickard v. Filburn, the Supreme Court found the Commerce Clause pliable enough to forbid an Ohio farmer from growing and consuming a specific amount of wheat on his own farm.
Then the Court arguably made things even worse with its 2005 decision in Gonzales v. Raich, where it held that medical marijuana cultivated and consumed entirely within the state of California somehow still counted as interstate commerce and was therefore subject to the federal Controlled Substances Act. As Justice Clarence Thomas remarked in his dissent, “By holding that Congress may regulate activity that is neither interstate nor commerce under the Interstate Commerce Clause, the Court abandons any attempt to enforce the Constitution’s limits on federal power.”
You can also thank Raich for those federal raids on local medicial marijuana clinics that President Barack Obama once pretended he was going to stop.
reason.com
Kelo v. City of New London (2005)
Are there any limits on government's authority to take property from citizens? The U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment seems to put pretty clear limits on the taking of "private property for public use" (with public use defined as projects such as railways and roads) and requires that owners deprived of their property must receive just compensation. That standard held up into the twentieth century, when a stream of court decisions began defining "public" downward and "blight" (one criterion for condemning private property) downward.
The 2005 Kelo decision completed that dreary progress. Justice John Paul Stevens ruled for the majority that a redevelopment agency in New London, Connecticut could seize homes of local families and give them to a private developer working with the Pfizer Corporation for a mixed-use plan dating to the 1990s. In a stinging dissent, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor noted that the Kelo decision overturned a judicial principal dating to 1798: A "law that takes property from A and gives it to B" cannot stand.
Stevens' decision still seems shockingly credulous and ill-considered seven years on. Kelo rejects any requirement that condemned property be put into public use, gives unlimited "deference" to politicians' economic judgments, and assumes the plan's "comprehensive character" and the "wisdom of the means the city has selected" would ensure against damaging private citizens for no public purpose.
In the end, though, Pfizer abandoned the project and the Fort Trumbull neighborhood, cleared of its houses, literally became a garbage dump. New London was made poorer, and although some states responded to the ruling with piecemeal efforts to rein in eminent domain abuse, Kelo's most important precedent has been to enshrine the unrepentant Stevens' legacy as an economic dullard and second-rate legal thinker.
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