. . . And A Little Help From Our Enemies

     -- by Brenda Grantland, Esq., F.E.A.R. Chronicles, Vol 1. No.
3, (August, 1992)

     I'll bet you can't guess what event first triggered the
current interest in asset forfeiture reform on Capitol Hill.  No,
it was not the publication of "Presumed Guilty" articles in the
Pittsburgh Press last year, but you're very warm.      

     According to a reliable source on the Hill, the publication of
"Presumed Guilty," an excellent series of articles written by
Andrew Schneider and Mary Pat Flaherty, would probably have gone
unnoticed by Congress (even though they were picked up by 140
newspapers around the country) if it had not been for the
extraordinary efforts of our good friend Cary Copeland, Director
and Chief Counsel of the Justice Department's Executive Office for
Asset Forfeiture.  (Sorry, Cary, that we called you Gary in our
last newsletter).  

     To make sure that no Congressman could escape noting the
heresy presented by the articles, on August 21, 1991, Cary wrote a
three page letter, accompanied by an eight page handout called
"Talking Points," and had them hand delivered (at taxpayer expense)
to every U.S. Senator and Representative. (I heard he also sent
them to every major newspaper in the country.)  

     Cary's letter and "Talking Points" (is that like a cross
between Talking Heads and Bless Its Pointed Little Head?)
endeavored to refute the Pittsburgh Press articles primarily by
smearing and discrediting the people mentioned in the stories.  

     Thanks to Cary's efforts, a lot of Senators and
Representatives who had only heard good things about asset
forfeiture (from law enforcement lobbyists) for so many years
realized for the first time that there might be another side to the
story, and had their staffers get the "Presumed Guilty" stories. 
The rest is history.

     Thanks for the contribution Cary!  
                                   
_____________________
     
     NOTE:  The "Presumed Guilty" series of stories is now
available for download from our Website Files menu, under the
filename of GUILTYA.ZIP or GUILTYW.ZIP, depending on whether you
want ASCII or Word Perfect format.  This is the entire series of
six articles. There was a computer file of the first of the six
stories that bounced around the bulletin boards last year, but this
is all six articles.  The Pittsburgh Press was kind enough to
provide us a copy on diskette in 1992 so we could post it on BBS's.

     Feel free to spread the file around other bulletin boards, and
do the same for other FEAR files.