On April 10, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, R, signed into law a sweeping reform package that effectively ends her state’s practice of taking property merely suspected of involvement in illegal activity. This process, which governments frequently engage in without a criminal conviction or even charges being filed, is commonly known as civil asset forfeiture.
As positive as Martinez’s action is, civil forfeiture remains a major problem in the U.S., and only a few states are currently working to fix it. As the Institute for Justice’s Darpana Sheth noted in testimony last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Federal and state government can still take property for civil forfeiture without even charging, much less convicting owners of a crime.”
Civil asset forfeiture has been the subject of several local and national journalistic investigations. It became an even more popular cause recently when HBO comedian John Oliver did an entire 16-minute segment on it for his show Last Week Tonight. Oliver focused on how police departments across America have been seizing and keeping money from people who are never even charged with crimes — in some cases with total freedom to use it to supplement their or the government’s budget.
As one police official in Missouri put it, the money is treated like “pennies from heaven” that the cops can use to buy “toys” they would not otherwise be able to justify in their budgets. There is often little public accountability as to how the forfeited funds are spent. In one case, a department was accused of using the money to buy alcohol and even a margarita-mixing machine.
That’s all funny, but the issue is not funny at all for thousands of Americans who find their property placed in limbo by more or less arbitrary government seizures. They find themselves in a strange universe where they are deprived of property more or less arbitrarily and forced to fight in order to win it back from the government. If that doesn’t sound consistent with the spirit of the Constitution’s guarantee of due process, it is because it really isn’t.
This easily abused government power has been used against homeowners, car owners, drivers who happen to be carrying a bit of cash and small businesses. The federal government’s actions against “structuring” (or small cash deposit) schemes — especially aggressive under the Obama administration — have hit legitimate small businesses especially hard, forcing some to close. According to IRS data, only 59 percent of these civil seizures ultimately held up in court in 2012, meaning that at least four in 10 victims of this practice were simply bullied by the government for the offense of using a bank. That doesn’t even count the cases where victims gave up fighting for lack of resources.
Even setting aside substantial evidence of abuse and harm to innocents, the principle here is most important. This is America. The government shouldn’t just be taking anyone’s property without due process or a criminal conviction.
The time for dramatic reform of civil forfeiture laws is here. Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and the bipartisan group in Congress working to reform the system deserve the applause and ongoing support of all Americans as they undertake this task.
