BUSTED

What kind of totalitarian police state allows the government to seize the
personal property of individuals who haven't been convicted of even a
single crime?

That'd be the good old U.S. of A.

It's called civil forfeiture, and police agencies don't just use it; many
depend on it for large chunks of their operating budgets. From 1992 to
1999, law enforcement agencies in Washington state confiscated more than
$38 million worth of homes, cars, boats and other goods and cash.

The practice has been lucrative for local cops, too. According to figures
from the state Treasurer's Office, In the last nine years the Clark County
Sheriff's Office, Vancouver Police Department and Clark- Skamania Drug Task
Force combined collected an estimated $2.4 million from suspected drug dealers.

Note: That's suspected drug dealers. A lot of them may have been found
guilty later, but under current state and federal laws it doesn't matter
one way or another. Police are allowed to seize a person's property simply
by demonstrating that there's probable cause to believe that the individual
has committed a crime.

Civil forfeiture laws became popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the
emotional fervor for the war on drugs tended to overshadow even the most
egregious violations of civil liberties.

Today, though, public officials from across the political spectrum have
come to see civil forfeiture in its current form as a bad deal. Apart from
concerns that it denies defendants their right to due process, there's the
issue of what happens to the money. In our state, 10 percent of the
proceeds from property seizures in drug cases goes to the state for drug
education; the rest can be spent by the local police agency for whatever it
wants.

In effect, the system puts profit ahead of justice a situation ripe for abuse.

A measure introduced in the Legislature last week would go a long way
toward a better system. Senate Bill 5935 would allow property to be seized
only after an individual is found guilty of a crime, and only if that
property can be shown "by clear and convincing evidence to have been
instrumental in committing or facilitating the crime." And all of the money
recovered would have to be spent on drug-treatment programs.

Residents of Oregon and Utah have already reined in their states' civil
forfeiture laws via initiative. Although the Washington bill is being
pushed by the American Civil Liberties Union, it has the support of some of
the most conservative members of the Legislature as well as some of the
most liberal, and rightly so.

But the law-and-order lobby is pretty effective at pushing emotional
buttons. Spokane Sheriff Larry Erickson, executive director of the
Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs and a former Spokane
County sheriff, defended the civil forfeiture law to The News Tribune in
Tacoma as a "a penalty against those people who are preying on our children."

Penalties are appropriate and just but only for the guilty.