Feds Want To Seize Suspects' Grillz (Gold Teeth)

Feds Want To Seize Suspects' Grillz

POSTED: 11:22 am EDT April 7, 2006

TACOMA, Wash. -- Talk about taking a bite out of crime -- government lawyers tried to remove and confiscate the gold dental work known as grillz from the mouths of two men facing drug charges.

"I've been doing this for over 30 years and I have never heard of anything like this," said Richard J. Troberman, a forfeiture specialist and past president of the Washington Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "It sounds like Nazi Germany when they were removing the gold teeth from the bodies, but at least then they waited until they were dead."

According to documents and lawyers involved in the case in U.S. District Court, Flenard T. Neal Jr. and Donald Jamar Lewis, charged with several drug and weapon violations, were taken on Tuesday from the Federal Detention Center to the U.S. marshal's office, where they were told the government had a warrant to seize the grills.

Before being put into a vehicle to be taken to a dentist in Seattle, they called their lawyers, who were able to halt the seizure, said Miriam Schwartz, Neal's public defender. A permanent stay of the seizure order was signed Tuesday by U.S. Magistrate J. Kelley Arnold, court documents show.

http://www.local6.com/news/8531456/detail.html

Joy was duking it out with Earl's ex-girlfriend who was a bounty hunter trying to haul Joy in. Joy ripped out the other's two gold teeth for post bail!

:D

Government lawyers who asked a federal judge on March 29 to order confiscation of the grills said they did not know the caps had been bonded to the drug defendants' teeth.

"Asset forfeiture is a fairly routine procedure, and our attorneys were under the impression that these snapped out like a retainer," said Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle.

Once the government understood that removal of the grills could damage the defendants' teeth, they abandoned the seizure attempt, she said.

Schwartz and Zenon Peter Olbertz, Lewis' lawyer, criticized what they said was a clandestine attempt to have the grills removed...

Well, they'd better spend time in the weight room in jail, else they may get some prison dentistry from amateur dentists in the big house!

As a fashion statement, to me, they scream POOR DENTAL HYGIENE!