Philly Prosecutors Won't Seize Family's Home Over Son's $40 Drug Deal

Philadelphia prosecutors agreed Thursday to halt efforts to seize the homes of two of the lead plaintiffs in a widely publicized federal suit challenging the city's use of civil forfeiture laws in drug cases.

But Christos Sourovelis and Doila Welch, both of whom saw their houses threatened after police arrested a relative dealing drugs on their properties, said they intended to keep on fighting.

In agreements of dismissal filed in Common Pleas Court, the District Attorney's Office agreed to drop its cases against properties owned by Sourovelis and Welch as long as both owners took "reasonable measures" to ensure no further drug crimes occurred there.

The decision comes four months after they and two other Philadelphia homeowners joined a class-action lawsuit, challenging the city's civil forfeiture program. Ostensibly aimed at depriving drug traffickers of cash, cars, property, and other fruits of crime, such seizures have increasingly drawn scrutiny for cases in which a homeowner is never accused of anything but still faces eviction from a house only tangentially related to a crime.

"After months of uncertainty, my family can finally rest easy knowing that our home is our home again," Sourovelis said Thursday. "That's why we're going to keep fighting for everyone still trapped in Philadelphia's civil forfeiture nightmare."

In May, Sourovelis, 52, and his wife, Markela, were kicked out of their $350,000 house in the Somerton section of Northeast Philadelphia - more than a month after police arrested their 22-year-old son, Yianni, for selling less than $40 of heroin outside.

Although Sourovelis said his family had no idea what their son was up to, prosecutors moved for permanent forfeiture of their property. The law allows authorities to go after properties suspected as criminal hot spots even if no one associated with them is ever charged.

"...a tax-funded life-and-property protection agency is a contradiction in terms: an expropriating property protector. Motivated, as everyone is, by self-interest and the disutility of labor, but equipped with the unique power to tax, state agents will invariably strive to maximize expenditures on protection — and almost all of a nation's wealth can conceivably be consumed by the cost of protection — and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work for it, the better off one will be."