A federal appellate court in New York ruled last year that the U.S. government must defend its decision to keep thousands of dollars seized from a Rochester, New York, woman in 2020 as part of a drug investigation involving her former boyfriend, and now the agency that had been keeping her money for more than three years has returned it rather than defend the seizure in court.
On Jan. 23, the Drug Enforcement Administration returned $8,040 to Cristal Starling following a multi-year court fight that ended happily when the agency abandoned its effort to keep the money after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sided with Starling last August.
“A lot of people are fearful of the law because they don’t know their rights,” Starling said to the Democrat and Chronicle last week. “They don’t educate themselves. They don’t do research.
“Honestly, I’ve been saying this from the beginning. It wasn’t about me. It’s about other people and how these things can continually affect people like me.”