Mid-Michigan civil forfeiture case appealed to U.S. Supreme Court

MID-MICHIGAN (WNEM) - A case involving property seized by mid-Michigan law enforcement has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Just doesn’t make sense that a government can take private property from innocent people and simply keep it to fund their own operations. It’s wrong. It’s just flat wrong,” said attorney Philip Ellison of Outside Legal Counsel.

He took a fight over seized property to the U.S. Supreme Court. The property was taken from the Shiawassee County home of his client, Gerald Ostipow, by the Saginaw County Sheriff’s Office during a marijuana growing investigation involving Ostipow’s adult son back in 2008.

“The sheriff -- at that time -- of Saginaw County went over with a search warrant and basically took everything that he had. If it wasn’t nailed down, the sheriff’s deputies took it away,” Ellison said.

He said the agency seized family heirlooms, tools, equipment, and most notably a 1965 Chevrolet Nova that Ostipow had nearly completed restoring.

He said in 2016, a Saginaw County judge ordered the return of Ostipow’s personal property, but by then it was too late.

Ellison said Sheriff William Federspiel, who succeeded then-Sheriff Charles Brown, used civil forfeiture to sell the items a year after they were seized.

“Civil asset forfeiture, and it’s where governments can take private property from innocent people because there’s not enough legal protections, similar to if you were to be charged as a criminal. So, people who are innocent of crimes can lose the private property because the government simply says, ‘This might be part of a criminal enterprise,’ when in fact it really isn’t,” Ellison said.

He views civil forfeiture as a legal loophole and is asking the justices to rule that it is no longer an option for governments to use to keep innocent owners’ property.

“Some courts have said, ‘This is wrong and this is unconstitutional.’ The Sixth Circuit, which is the one that controls the Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, has said the legal loopholes is something we can’t fix,” Ellison said.

TV5 reached out to Federspiel for an interview, but he became unavailable at the time of the scheduled interview.

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