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Friday, February 05, 2010

Law - "Take the Money and Run:The crazy perversities of civil asset forfeiture"

Supplementing this ILB entry from Feb. 1, 2010, and recalling the many ILB entries on the controversy surrounding the Delaware County prosecutor's use of the process in drug cases, Radley Balko of Slate has a long article dated Feb. 4, 2010, focusing on Indiana. It begins:

Last month, the Supreme Court tossed out the case Alvarez v. Smith, a challenge to a portion of the asset forfeiture in Illinois that allows the government to keep seized property for up to six months before giving its owner a day in court. The Court declined to rule on the case after determining it to be moot—all of the parties had settled with the government by the time the case made it to Washington.

That's too bad, because the Illinois law should be struck down, and also because the country could benefit from a discussion about the continuing injustice of many states' civil asset forfeiture laws.

Civil asset forfeiture, an outgrowith of the drug war, rests on the legal theory that property can be guilty of a crime. Once authorities establish a nexus between a piece of property and criminal activity—most commonly drug cases, but also prostitution, DWI, and white collar crime—the owner must prove his innocence or lose his property, even if he's never charged with an underlying crime. In most jurisdictions, seized cash and the proceeds from the auctioned property go back to the police departments and prosecutors' offices responsible for the seizure. The scheme, which creates unsavory incentives for public officials, became popular because of a 1984 federal bill designed to encourage aggressive enforcement.

After a number of outrageous forfeiture cases made national headlines, Congress reformed federal civil forfeiture law in 2000. But egregious abuses are still common at the state level. The Indiana case of Anthony Smelley illustrates just how perverse forfeiture proceedings can get.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on February 5, 2010 08:35 AM
Posted to General Law Related