Both houses of the New Mexico legislature have unanimously passed a bill that would require cops to wait until someone is actually convinced of a crime before seizing their property. As civil asset forfeiture law currently stands, police can seize money and valuables if they simply suspect that the property has been involved with a crime.
The bill, which has already unanimously passed the Senate, would also direct any profits from these seizures to be auctioned off and the proceeds placed in the state’s general fund. This would preclude cops from using seizures to pad their own budgets, as police offices across the country currently do.
This would also block New Mexico from participating in the extremely popular federal “Equitable Sharing” program. This program, run by the Department of Justice, allows state police agencies to pass off their cases to DOJ, which seizes the assets and then gives profits back to the local forces. This often allows the agencies to skirt any local restrictions on civil seizure. The New Mexico law leaves no such possibility, stating, “A law enforcement agency shall not retain forfeited or abandoned property.”
“Part of the reason this bill was put together was in fact to close that loophole,” Micah McCoy of the ACLU’s New Mexico chapter told Reason. “This basically ends that [civil] forfeiture in New Mexico, and now we’ll only have criminal forfeiture.”
Among the legislation’s stated goals is to “protect the constitutional rights of persons [accused of a crime] whose property is subject to forfeiture and of innocent [persons] owners holding interests in property subject to forfeiture.”
In one high-profile case of civil seizure abuse in the state, police pulled over a 60-year-old African American man and his son for speeding. They were on a road trip, and had $17,000 in cash stowed in their car for their journey and to help a relative pay for home repairs.
According to the Santa Fe New Mexican’s report, the cop then told the two, “This isn’t over yet.”
They were later pulled over again, at which time police seized all their cash and their rental car. They left them at the airport with only a jar of coins, and did not return the money until after the ACLU got involved. Generally in such cases property owners are treated guilty until proven innocent, even when not formally accused of a crime.
There are dozens of similar horror stories of civil seizure abuse all over the country, leading to recent small reforms at DOJ’s program.
Now all the New Mexico bill needs is the signature of Governor Susana Martinez to become law.
