‘Furious’ NC judge threatens jail time unless town, cops return seized cash
In late November, an Iredell County court ordered Mooresville Police to return almost $17,000 that its officers had seized after finding a small amount of marijuana in a man’s car.
On Tuesday — 77 days later and with the debt to Jermaine Sanders still unpaid — one judge’s patience ran dry.
In an order expressed more in anger than legalese, District Court Judge Christine Underwood found the police and the Town of Mooresville in contempt of court and threatened to put one or more officials in jail unless Sanders gets his money by next Thursday.
“I don’t know who to put in jail, but somebody needs to go,” Underwood recalls saying during the hearing.
For good measure, Underwood expanded her jail threat to the town council or whoever has the authority to approve Sanders’ refund and cut him a check.
“It’s incredibly hard to put a town in jail,” Underwood told The Charlotte Observer on Wednesday. “We don’t like putting people in jail for contempt. We like them to do what they were supposed to do in the first place ... But it’s unconscionable to me as a judge to have a valid court order that someone is willfully failing to comply with.”
The town’s next move is unclear. Reached by email Tuesday night, Charlotte attorney Pat Flanagan, who represented the police at the hearing, declined comment.
Mooresville Mayor Miles Atkins did not respond to an email Tuesday. Kim Sellers, the town’s public information officer, said officials are awaiting Underwood’s written order while “exploring all options, including appeal.”
Sanders’ attorney, Ashley Cannon of Statesville, welcomed Underwood’s ruling, in which the judge made her anger clear at months of police inaction.
“My god, I can’t tell you how furious she was about the disrespect she’s received,” Cannon said. “She kept saying, ‘They are stealing Mr. Sanders’ money. The Mooresville police and the town of Mooresville are stealing his money.’ She was livid.”
Cannon’s dissatisfaction rivals the judge’s. She said her client has been the victim of what amounts to be a 77-day shell game run by police, even as the department ignored the orders of two judges.
“I have never seen such disregard for a court order before,” Cannon said. “The Mooresville police have basically turned up their noses at this from the start.”
When money’s tied to crime
The legal fight focuses on a controversial law enforcement tool known as “civil asset forfeiture,” which was created to siphon off the resources of gangs, drug rings and other illicit enterprises. It allows police to seize, keep or sell any property they deem to have been involved in a crime.
The amount of property and cash confiscated each year now runs into the billions. Last month, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Charlotte filed legal dibs on almost $1 million discovered during a traffic stop in Monroe last May. In a filing, prosecutors say they believe the money is tied to gangs and drugs.
But critics say individual residents too often are unfairly targeted with government seizures of cash, cars and homes, which law enforcement agencies can keep even in the absence of criminal charges or convictions.
“Police abuse of civil asset forfeiture laws have shaken our nation’s conscience,” the American Civil Liberties Union says.
Courts also have taken a critical eye. In 2019, a Myrtle Beach-area judge declared South Carolina’s asset-forfeiture law unconstitutional, ruling that “enforcement personnel have an institutional financial incentive to vigorously pursue forfeitures regardless of the merits of the action.”
Cannon? She calls the practice “highway robbery.”
In Sanders’ case, police added an unusual twist.
‘Game-changer’
According to court documents, Sanders, a Connecticut resident whose daughter lives in Iredell County, was arrested Nov. 16 on a misdemeanor possession of marijuana charge. It followed a warrantless police search the day before of the defendant’s leased vehicle outside a Mooresville motel. Court records indicate police held the search based on a tip. Sanders was not on hand and did not give his permission.
The two officers at the scene found a small amount of a “green leafy substance” and $16,761 packed in a plastic bag stored in the console, records show.
According to a police affidavit cited by Cannon, the officers confiscated the money “rather than leave it unattended in an abandoned rental vehicle.”
Two days later, Cannon filed her first motion asking the courts to order police to give the money back. She argued that Sanders’ cash was not evidence of a crime and that it far exceeded the value of what she describes as the “crumb of weed” police found in the car. District Court Judge Deborah Brown scheduled a hearing for Nov. 24.
On Nov. 23, however, police sent a certified check for — wait for it — $16,761 to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, documents allege. A copy of the check was presented to Brown the next day as part of the police department’s central argument: We no longer have Sanders’ money, so we can’t return it.
Cannon said the timing was not coincidental. “They got rid of the money the day before the hearing to make me chase it in the federal courts where you have basically no chance of getting it back,” she said.
Brown sided with Cannon and ordered police to return the cash. When Cannon followed up the next day with prosecutors, she received a copy of an email Mooresville police Detective Shawn Elliott had sent to an assistant district attorney referring “Ms. Cannon to the United States Attorney’s office or the United States Department of Homeland Security for any further inquiries about this case.”
Three weeks later, on Dec. 10, when police still had not repaid the money, Cannon filed a second motion asking Brown to bring the police back to court to explain why they shouldn’t be held in contempt.
Brown retired Dec. 31, leaving Judge Underwood to pursue the money. At a Jan. 26 hearing, Underwood found probable cause of contempt, ruling that police were guilty of “inexcusable” noncompliance with Brown’s earlier order, documents show.
Which set the stage for Tuesday.
‘Unclean hands’
Flanagan, according to Cannon, told Underwood that she did not have jurisdiction in the case because the money had been turned over to the federal government, which also meant that his clients couldn’t comply with her order.
Besides, Flanagan argued, police and the town had governmental immunity from the judge finding them in contempt and ordering them jailed.
That argument apparently was not persuasive, given that Underwood threatened to put one or more of the town’s top elected or appointed officials behind bars for failing to follow the court’s order.
In her interview with the Observer, the judge acknowledged her anger, describing the police’s move in November to ship Sanders’ money off to the feds as “the game-changer.”
“All they had to do was come into court, argue the law that the seizure was legal and let Judge Brown make the determination. Instead they tried to take the power out of her hands,” Underwood said.
As a result, she said, the town and police both acted in bad faith — known in legal terms as “unclean hands” — because “they had the opportunity to fix this and didn’t.”
As of Wednesday, the money trail still runs through the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. Asked if the agency had been approached about returning Sanders’ money, Lindsay Williams, a spokesman for Homeland Security Investigations, said he could not comment on “active litigation.”
Nonetheless, Cannon has put the town and the police on the clock. They have six business days remaining to make Sanders whole or Cannon says she’s going back to court.
This time for arrest orders, she says, as many as the judge will sign.
This story was originally published February 11, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
