Add the Hoosier State to the list of those attempting to reform civil forfeiture, the procedure by which law enforcement confiscates property and places the burden on the owner to prove it wasn’t involved in a crime.
The state Senate in Indianapolis overwhelmingly (by a 40-10 vote) passed a bill that will make it much harder for the police to justify taking property unless its owner is actually convicted of a crime. Even then, the burden of proof would be on the government to demonstrate that the property was crime-related. The bill, which is vocally opposed by some Indiana prosecutors, next heads to the state House.
As crazy as it sounds, in many U.S. jurisdictions and at the federal level, law enforcement routinely takes property from people who have been neither charged nor convicted of anything. Civil forfeiture has been used to take cars and homes, but it is most frequently used to seize cash. In some cases, the mere fact that someone is holding a sizeable amount of cash has been used to justify a forfeiture, on the grounds that merely carrying so much cash suggests involvement in the drug trade.
President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions are big fans of civil forfeiture. So were the Obama administration and both of his attorneys general. In 2014, the federal government obtained more than $5 billion through civil forfeitures, according to the Washington Post — $1.5 billion more than was stolen in all burglaries in the U.S. that year.
The money is often used to fund police departments and prosecutors’ offices, which critics say creates a perverse incentive for law enforcement to use the procedure aggressively whenever the opportunity arises. The Indiana bill would not change this practice, although several states’ reform laws have done so. Recently, Ohio joined a dozen other states that have recently reformed civil forfeiture.
