I’ve spent 30 years structuring transactions in which ownership must be provable, documented, and defensible before a dollar changes hands. Civil asset forfeiture inverts that premise. The government doesn’t have to prove you did anything wrong. It just has to seize the property and let you spend the next year proving you didn’t.

Halima Culley found that out by accident. She bought a car for her college-age son to use at school. He got pulled over, police found marijuana and a handgun, and Alabama seized the car under a statute that doesn’t require the owner to be charged with anything. Culley wasn’t arrested. She wasn’t present. She also wasn’t getting her car back anytime soon.