School officially started this week for Diana and the grandchildren. The kids started Wednesday. I met them at the bus stop and walked them the quarter of a block to their house. It was kind of fun watching Grandson come off the bus. His sisters were already a quarter of the way to the house before he got across the street.
Diana started Thursday and she said it looks like it’s going to be a good year. There was typical first-day confusion and chaos, but things went pretty well overall.
It’s been quite revealing to see what all goes into her getting her classroom and lesson plan ready for the year. We spent probably 28 hours together setting things up, and I know she put in another dozen hours or more on her own. That was cleaning out and rearranging cabinets, moving desks around, putting posters up, and so forth. The cabinet work probably took the longest, since she’s a first-year teacher taking over from a teacher who’d been there for a while. Plus, the school changed curriculum this year, so she had to box up the old stuff and get the new stuff sorted.
Reading
I read a weekly piece at Reason called “Short Circuit.” It’s an edited repost of the weekly Institute for Justice newsletter of the same title. Short Circuit is “your concise (and sometimes irreverent) source for important and interesting cases and legal stories you might otherwise have missed.” While many people hang on every word from SCOTUS, the reality is that the decisions that really matter (and the ones that set up the big cases at the Supreme Court) are all circuit court decisions. IJ shares the interesting ones, and I enjoy reading them, even if I don’t always understand the legal concepts involved.
This week’s edition covered a story I mentioned back in February about a couple trying to establish a green cemetery in Michigan. But Brooks Township passed a moratorium on new cemeteries, citing completely inapplicable concerns about what the Quackenbushes had planned.
This week, the Newaygo County Circuit Court heard arguments on a motion to dismiss from Brooks Township.
The court not only ruled against the motion, it ruled that the ban was unconstitutional.
That’s about as big a win as anyone could have hoped for.
IJ is taking on another big case, this one a forfeiture abuse case in Indiana. FedEx has a big hub there. Indianapolis cops will pull packages from the conveyor belts and do a K9 search. If the dog alerts and they find cash in the package, the county prosecutor will begin a forfeiture case.
I don’t know why in the 21st century people will ship any amount of cash. There are simply too many well-protected ways of transferring funds these days. But Henry and Minh Cheng sold some jewelry to a retail customer in Virginia. That customer sent the payment in cash via FedEx. The dog alerted (because about 80% of US currency is contaminated by cocaine) and the prosecutor moved to seize the cash.
And because of the way civil asset forfeiture works, the prosecutor doesn’t have to prove that the money was used in a crime, so they don’t have to show what crime was committed. They just file a case against $42,825.
The other really aggravating thing to me is that the sender is in Virginia and the Chengs live in California. Nothing happened in Indiana except that the package happened to pass through the Indianapolis FedEx hub. Had it passed through the Memphis hub and on to Oakland, Indianapolis cops never would have seen it. The Marion County Prosecutor’s Office knows there’s no real connection to the state or the county in any of these cases.
The Chengs are suing the state and prosecutor Ryan Mears and are requesting class status for the lawsuit. They allege that Mr. Mears has filed over 130 forfeiture cases since 2022 alone.
I wish them rapid success in their case. I’d like to see Mr. Mears sanctioned both personally and professionally for his parts in this scheme. He’s supposed to be one of the good guys.
Writing
No soundtrack this week. I was up and down a bunch and never settled on any music.
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