The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the FBI violated the constitutional rights of some Beverly Hills residents by seizing hundreds of safe deposit boxes without “any legal basis.”
In 2021, the feds seized $85 million in cash, precious metals and family property stored in about 800 safe deposit boxes in Los Angeles.
The class action lawsuit alleges that the FBI “bypassed the court-approved search warrant” when it raided the storage provider, US Private Vaults (USPV) and snooped into the contents of safe deposit boxes.
The feds charged the USPV with conspiracy to sell drugs and money laundering, but the owners of the funds were not charged with any crimes.
The search warrant only authorized the FBI to search safe deposit boxes “to identify the owners in order to notify them” that their property was being claimed.
FBI agents were caught on video going through the boxes, tearing open packages with coins after already recognizing the owner's name.
“Items appear to be missing” – Owner's attorney told Los Angeles Times The FBI inventory list did not include $75,000 in gold coins.
The Institute for Justice, a watchdog accountability group, is leading the fight and filed a temporary restraining order this week on behalf of several owners who could lose the contents of their safe deposit boxes if a federal judge doesn't intervene.
This is “the most egregious Fourth Amendment violation the Institute for Justice has ever seen,” Frommer, the IJ’s attorney, said when he announced the case. “It's like the government breaking into every apartment in the building because the landlord was dealing drugs in the hallway.”
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment rights of Los Angeles residents by seizing 1,400 safe deposit boxes.
Writing before a Ninth Circuit panel on Tuesday, Circuit Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. found that the government had exceeded the scope of the warrant — and its own rules for inventorying property that is not subject to a warrant but nonetheless “boxes it had in its possession — of During the inspection of the boxes and the initiation of subsequent criminal investigations based on their contents.”
Judge Milan Smith Jr., a Bush appointee, criticized the federal government for illegal searches and seizures.
Smith, who was appointed by President George W. Bush, also wrote that it was “particularly troubling” that the government could not explain how far it thought it could go with these “stockpile” inspections. Without such an explanation, he wrote, it was not clear how such searches differed from the kind of unlimited searches that existed in pre-Revolutionary America — which prompted the Fourth Amendment to be written into the Constitution in the first place. The newspaper said.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
The FBI violated people's constitutional rights when it opened and “stripped” the contents of hundreds of safe deposit boxes during a raid on a Beverly Hills vault in 2021, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturns a lower court's decision in favor of the FBI. The panel found that the agency's cataloging of the contents of privately rented boxes, without individual criminal warrants for each, violated the Fourth Amendment rights of box owners against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The ruling requires federal officials to destroy any inventory records they kept for hundreds of box holders who were otherwise found intact and had their physical possessions returned. Officials must also destroy records that are included in a criminal law enforcement database called Sentinel.
