SUPREME COURT REJECTS INMATE APPEAL

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed the way the FBI notifies
prisoners about plans to seize their property.

The court rejected a jailed drug offender's arguments that paperwork should
be delivered to federal prisons and signed for by the inmate.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who wrote the 5-4 decision, said
"heroic efforts" are not required to get notice to inmates.

Larry Dean Dusenbery had claimed his constitutional rights were violated
because he did not receive a letter the FBI sent by certified mail to
prison notifying him of plans to confiscate his car and about $22,000 in cash.

"Today's decision diminishes the safeguard of notice, affording an
opportunity to be heard, before one is deprived of property," Justice Ruth
Bader Ginsburg wrote in a dissent, joined by Justices John Paul Stevens,
David H. Souter and Stephen Breyer.

An inmate "receives his mail only through the combined good offices of two
bureaucracies which he can neither monitor nor control," the Postal Service
and the Bureau of Prisons, Ginsburg wrote.

Federal prison officials have changed procedures to ensure inmates get
their government-related mail, Ginsburg wrote, and "the new rules show that
substantial improvements in reliability could have been had, in 1988 and
years before, at minimal expense and inconvenience."

Dusenbery's case turned on the Fifth Amendment's guarantee that property
will not be seized without "due process."

Rehnquist said he was unmoved by arguments that the government controlled
Dusenbery's whereabouts and should have been able to get mail to him.

"'Undoubtedly, the government could make a special effort in any case (just
as it did in the movie "Saving Private Ryan") to assure that a particular
piece of mail reaches a particular individual who is in one way or another
in the custody of the government," Rehnquist wrote.

The chief justice said those efforts are not required.

Dusenbery, of Ohio, pleaded guilty to drug and gun charges in 1986 and went
to a federal prison in Michigan. Dusenbery contends the cash and car that
were confiscated were not drug profits.

Dusenbery had also lost in federal court and before the 6th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals.

The case is Dusenbery v. United States, 00-6567.