By ANDREW SCHNEIDER

Scripps Howard News Service

May 14, 1993

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - It took two years, two months and five days, but a federal judge has ordered the Drug Enforcement Agency to give Willie Jones his $9,000 back. The decision by U.S. District Judge Thomas Wiseman of Nashville reverses a trend in federal courts to support law enforcement seizures of money from innocent people, especially minorities, who fit broadly drawn profiles of drug traffickers, say authorities who have investigated the government's use of seizure laws. Jones, a 44-year-old Tennessee landscaper, was reluctantly thrust to the forefront of the highly publicized battle.

``This may be the first case in which a federal judge has specifically determined that drug officers were targeting people on the basis of race and found a constitutional violation in that sort of tactic,'' said E.E. Edwards III, Jones' lawyer and the head of a task force of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers investigating forfeiture abuse.

Scripps Howard News Service first reported Jones' plight in 1991 as part of a 10-month, nationwide investigation into how the forfeiture law was being applied. Jones was one of 510 forfeiture and seizure cases the news service investigated.

Jones' struggle with the government began Feb. 27, 1991, at Nashville's Metro Airport when an American Airline ticket agent, who had been promised a cut of any money that drug cops might find, called the airport-based DEA-run team about a large black man wearing casual clothes who had paid cash for a quick round trip ticket to Houston.

Within 10 minutes, Jones was stopped and searched by police, who quickly seized $9,000 in cash that he was carrying. No drugs were found. He wasn't arrested. Police told Jones they were keeping the money because they believed he was going to buy drugs.

To buttress their right to the money, police said Dakota, a Nashville drug dog, had detected cocaine on the cash.

Jones explained that he was making a trip to buy plants for his landscaping business. He said he used cash to get a better price, as he had done on several earlier trips. Police didn't accept his explanation and kept his money.

Judge Wiseman ruled, ``Based on the credible evidence presented at the trial, Mr. Jones was unreasonably seized in violation of the Fourth Amendment'' which prohibits illegal search and seizure of property.

Jones and thousands of others have been swept up in a law enforcement net known as a profile stop - a series of individually innocent factors which, when combined, signals to police that the person they've stopped is probably involved in drug trafficking.

Wiseman called the Jones seizure ``a forfeiture proceeding started in bad faith with wild allegations based on the hope that something would turn up to justify the suit.''

Although officially denied, in almost all cases, the race of the suspect is the trigger for a profile stop.

Scripps Howard's investigation showed that 77 percent of people stopped at airports, bus terminals, train stations and on highways were black, Hispanic or Asian.

Wiseman allowed that the isolated voluntary questioning of a citizen belonging to a racial minority does not amount to a violation of constitutional rights. However, he said, ``The discriminatory investigation of citizens on the basis of race certainly violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.'' Key evidence to support the police seizure of Jones's money and almost all of the other profile stop cases investigated by Scripps Howard was the dog sniff, the fact that a dog trained to detect narcotics indicated that the seized money was tainted with cocaine.

``As a growing chorus of courts are finding, the evidence of a narcotic- trained dog's alert to the currency is of extremely little weight,'' Wiseman wrote.

The judge cited a study by Lee Hearn, chief toxicologist for the Dade County Florida Medical Examiner's office, who found that 97 percent of the bills from around the country tested positively for cocaine.

Wiseman acknowledged that several other federal courts have ruled that the government may offer otherwise inadmissible evidence during a probable cause hearing supporting a seizure, but said he disagreed. ``There is nothing in the statute to suggest that Congress intended to relax the Federal Rules of Evidence for the government's benefit in forfeiture proceedings,'' Wiseman said.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., applauded the judge's decision. ``Mr. Jones was one of the many cases where overzealous law enforcement agents have victimized innocent people,'' said Conyers, whose House Government Operations subcommittee held hearings last fall in response to Scripps Howard's findings. Jones was the star witness of the first hearing. Conyer's committee has additional hearings planned for next month.

Conyers said, ``Because a portion of any assets seized go directly to the seizing agency, law enforcement agents become more concerned with seizing assets than with fighting crime and seizing drugs.'' Wiseman said the practice presents ``substantial opportunity for abuse and potentiality for corruption.'' He said, ``The obviously dangerous potentiality for abuse in the forfeiture scheme should trigger, at the very least, heightened scrutiny by the courts when a seizure is contested.''

(Andrew Schneider is assistant managing editor for investigations for Scripps Howard News Service)

Page Updated February, 1997