Cristina Schultz has had her money seized by the federal government even though she has not been charged with any federal crimes. Schultz worked as a very expensive escort (call girl) to pay off her loans from when she went to Stanford Law School . . . from where she graduated in good stead . . . see Woman allegedly pays off Stanford Law loans as call girl . . . evidently, her rather pricey services were very well reviewed by clients. It looks like the government’s strongest case is going to be for tax evasion as her real income has to be a lot higher than her reported income but either way the asset seizing rules really need to be overhauled as it just seems pretty wrong big time that the government has the right and uses that right to seize properties and assets of individuals for whom no criminal charges have been filed . . . the rules were originally put in place to fight organized crime to stop the ability of organizations to continue to operate when prosecuting a single individual would do little . . . the rules have been used to destroy families with suspected . . . key word suspected, not proven . . . ties to terrorists (in some cases, the only evidence or link has been a common surname) . . . and the harrassment of individuals who have proven to be inconvenient for one reason or another . . . the Schultz case is just another one where prosecutors don’t have actual evidence of wrong doing . . . so far, just hearsay and hunches . . . and so they play the seizure rule. In the US, when you are charged with a crime, you are innocent until proven guilty, the burden of proof rests upon the heads of the prosecution . . . but when you aren’t charged then the government doesn’t have to prove anything, they can in effect just take what you have . . . this has become even more true since the Patriot Act supended large swathes of civil liberties (and has been over-zealously used as an excuse for sloppy police, detective, or legal investigation . . . the “we don’t have to worry about proving details now as we can just use the blanket rules to sweep all the objections away”).

Obviously, if Schultz . . . or, Brazil, as she went by professionally . . . has broken federal laws then she should be charged . . . but if the prosecutors can’t make their case then they should work harder or leave her alone. Either way, seizing assets without the ability to prove any actual wrong doing is just not playing fair. Whose to say they won’t do the same thing to you or me . . . we protect the rights of the good guys by risking that a few bad guys might slip through the cracks. The founding fathers’ principle of “better to run the risk of letting fifty guilty men go free than to risk wrongful punishment of even one innocent soul” is still a pretty damned good operating principle.

Sure, I want to see the guilty folks . . . the ones guilty of serious crimes, not high-priced escort services or even regular prostitutes which I believe should be legalized anyway (extra taxes and more protection for the women doing the work and for the guys who will be patronizing them anyway . . . saftey and public health are better served with legalization but if you disagree, fine, you have the right to dumb ideas) . . . I don’t want to see abuse of power just to hassle someone they couldn’t make a case against . . . nor, do I wish to see us run the risk of these same arbitrary rules being applied to any of us. Remember, when the Nazis came and took the gays away . . . no one complained as it was for them not us . . . then when they took away the jews . . . no one complained as it was them not us . . . then the knock was on our own door and it was too late to stop the juggernaut as our neighbors simply turned their backs and sighed in relief that the authorities were coming for us not them. May not seem to be all that applicable in this case but is a very similar breed of monkey, different banana.