Agencies that make seizures say they work hard to be fair. They even return money and cars that state law allows them to keep.
“It doesn’t mean that because you can forfeit something, that you have to do it,” Cobb District Attorney Vic Reynolds said.
In practice, though, what a prosecutor considers “lenient” can amount to unjust punishment in the eyes of an owner.
In 2011, Tiffany Abbott-Holschbach’s boyfriend, Corey Brown, was supposed to walk to the store with their child to purchase money orders for rent and bills, she said. Instead, Brown got into her rental car with the child and a second man. Between them, the men had more than 100 grams of marijuana, according to a police report.
The next time Abbott-Holschbach saw Brown, he was face down on the ground and in handcuffs. Cobb County police seized $1,959 he had in cash. They said they both told officers at the scene that they had her money, but police decided to take all of it.
“I didn’t even know that I had the right to fight for my money back,” Abbot-Holschbach said.
With free help from a sympathetic attorney, Abbott-Holschbach used a piece of lined notebook paper to write a filing that asked the court to give back the money.
She included check stubs that showed she made enough money to have made at least a portion of that money from her customer service job.
The district attorney’s office countered that the second man at the scene had claimed that $1,000 of the cash came from a drug deal.
Cobb police had the right to keep the entire sum because her hand-written filing was not notarized, prosecutors said. They decided to return a portion, they said, to help her family.
Abb0tt-Holschbach received $600 of the $1,959. It was too late. She and her two children were evicted from their home, and her car was repossessed. Brown was found guilty.
“I completely agree with him going to jail. But I had to pay for what he did,” Abbott-Holschbach said.
Reynolds, who was not head of the office at the time, said officers could not have returned the cash immediately. It’s too easy to make the wrong call at a chaotic crime scene.
The civil process protects everyone involved, he said.
“In a general sense, I think the statute is fair, if officers are doing it properly, agencies are doing it properly, and there are safeguards,” Reynolds said.
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