US Authorities attempt Nazi style gold teeth grab
Author: Jonty Skrufff
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Prosecutors in Tacoma, Washington were criticised this week for trying to confiscate gold teeth caps known as ‘grills’ out of the mouths two men accused of drug charges, under America’s notoriously harsh Asset Forfeiture Laws.
Federal cops told prisoners Flenard Neal and Donald Jamar Lewis that they had a warrant to remove their gold teeth and were driving them to the dentist to have them drilled off when the pair’s lawyers managed to persuade a judge to halt the operations, just in time.
"I've been doing this for over 30 years and I have never heard of anything like this,” top Washington criminal defence lawyer Richard Troberman told the Charlotte Observer.
“It sounds like Nazi Germany when they were removing the gold teeth from the bodies, but at least then they waited until they were dead."
America’s Asset Forfeiture Laws allow cops to seize, and retain, money, cars and even houses if they can establish even the most tenuous of drug links, prompting civil liberties organisation the ACLU to launch an advertising campaign in 2001 with the strap line ‘who can you call when the police are the ones robbing you-’
"Thanks to civil asset forfeiture laws, possessions that took you a lifetime to acquire can be taken in the blink of an eye, or, more accurately, the flash of a badge," the advertisement, which appeared in the New York Times, also warned.
"The forfeiture laws were designed as a new government weapon in the 'war on drugs.' But they've done little more than provide law enforcement with a license to steal."
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