Don't know what civil asset forfeiture is? You do now:

On a bright Thursday afternoon in 2007, Jennifer Boatright, a waitress at a Houston bar-and-grill, drove with her two young sons and her boyfriend, Ron Henderson, on U.S. 59 toward Linden, Henderson’s home town, near the Texas-Louisiana border. They made the trip every April, at the first signs of spring, to walk the local wildflower trails and spend time with Henderson’s father. This year, they’d decided to buy a used car in Linden, which had plenty for sale, and so they bundled their cash savings in their car’s center console. Just after dusk, they passed a sign that read “Welcome to Tenaha: A little town with bigPotential!”

They pulled into a mini-mart for snacks. When they returned to the highway ten minutes later, Boatright, a honey-blond “Texas redneck from Lubbock,” by her own reckoning, and Henderson, who is Latino, noticed something strange. The same police car that their eleven-year-old had admired in the mini-mart parking lot was trailing them. Near the city limits, a tall, bull-shouldered officer named Barry Washington pulled them over.

He asked if Henderson knew that he’d been driving in the left lane for more than half a mile without passing.

No, Henderson replied. He said he’d moved into the left lane so that the police car could make its way onto the highway.

Were there any drugs in the car? When Henderson and Boatright said no, the officer asked if he and his partner could search the car.

The officers found the couple’s cash and a marbled-glass pipe that Boatright said was a gift for her sister-in-law, and escorted them across town to the police station. In a corner there, two tables were heaped with jewelry, DVD players, cell phones, and the like. According to the police report, Boatright and Henderson fit the profile of drug couriers: they were driving from Houston, “a known point for distribution of illegal narcotics,” to Linden, “a known place to receive illegal narcotics.” The report describes their children as possible decoys, meant to distract police as the couple breezed down the road, smoking marijuana. (None was found in the car, although Washington claimed to have smelled it.)

The county’s district attorney, a fifty-seven-year-old woman with feathered Charlie’s Angels hair named Lynda K. Russell, arrived an hour later. Russell, who moonlighted locally as a country singer, told Henderson and Boatright that they had two options. They could face felony charges for “money laundering” and “child endangerment,” in which case they would go to jail and their children would be handed over to foster care. Or they could sign over their cash to the city of Tenaha, and get back on the road. “No criminal charges shall be filed,” a waiver she drafted read, “and our children shall not be turned over to CPS,” or Child Protective Services.

“Where are we?” Boatright remembers thinking. “Is this some kind of foreign country, where they’re selling people’s kids off?” Holding her sixteen-month-old on her hip, she broke down in tears.

Reading the whole thing will make you angry. But you should still read the whole thing.

Benjamin Wittes discusses the reasons why we should be glad that James Comey was nominated to be the next FBI director--reasons I am fully in agreement with:

Here’s the easy part: A qualified director of the FBI needs to have significant managerial experience in law enforcement. These days, you particularly want someone with a real intimacy with national security investigations and counterterrorism cases. You want someone who knows the bureau and can command the respect of its famously insular culture. You want someone with that ineffable quality of great leadership. And you want someone who somehow projects an anti-Hoover-like incorruptibility. Put this all together, and the easy part is not at all easy. There are very few people who truly have all of these qualities—and Comey is one of them.

But Comey also has an additional quality that makes him a unique candidate for the position—unique not just now but over a very long time. To be a successful FBI director, you have to be someone the public believes is truly independent, someone who will follow the facts wherever they go, who will investigate other members of the administration in which you (sort of) serve. The public should even believe that if it came to that, you would stare down the President himself over compliance with the law. It requires highly specialized circumstances to establish this particular quality beyond a shade of public doubt—and most people, fortunately for them and for the public—never have the opportunity to do so. But Comey did have this quality of his leadership tested—and in an episode initially secret, and now famous, he showed himself capable of looking a president of his own party in the eye and telling him that he would resign unless legal problems in a high-stakes classified program were fixed. Nobody, including Barack Obama, can now doubt for a minute that he is capable of doing what needs to be done and telling the president the painful truths he may need to hear.

Wittes calls for Comey to be confirmed as soon as possible. I join that call, and congratulate President Obama on a very good selection.