FORFEITURE LAWS NEED TO CHANGE

Civil forfeiture is a cash machine for law enforcement agencies, which
seize assets ranging from cars to money to hotels and keep the
proceeds for their operations. When profit-seeking law enforcement
agencies can feather their nests with forfeited property, they abandon
a basic principle of our criminal justice system: That honest police
and prosecutors will not pursue unjust cases, even if they could win
them.

We need to change the incentives by taking forfeited property away
from law enforcement agencies.

Under civil-asset forfeiture laws, the government can seize property
suspected of involvement in illegal activities even if a crime is
never proved, based on the fiction that the property committed the
offense.

The best-known law, the drug forfeiture statute, authorizes civil
forfeiture of equipment, vehicles, cash and real property used in
connection with drugs. Under this law, there are few checks on
law-enforcement officials' discretion about what to seize. An
unsupervised official is tempted to become a rogue one.

Dozens of forfeiture laws nationwide cover offenses ranging from
driving while intoxicated to gambling to tax fraud. Like the drug
forfeiture law, many combine vast scope with a low standard of proof.

Even under the federal Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act, which was
enacted in April after a seven-year struggle with the law-enforcement
lobby, the government can seize an asset without meeting the stringent
"beyond a reasonable doubt" test used in criminal cases. Often, no
court hearing is required before seizure.

With pickings so easy, the police have pursued forfeitures on a grand
scale. In 1998, the U.S. Justice Department's Assets Forfeiture Fund
contained 24,903 seized assets valued at $1-billion.

Easy success is not the only reason for the high volume of
forfeitures. Law-enforcement agencies have an incentive to seize the
maximum possible because much of the seized property lifts their
bottom lines.

Under the drug-forfeiture law, proceeds go to the seizing agency
rather than to the U.S. Treasury's general fund. In 1987, the Drug
Enforcement Administration even became self-financing when its
seizures exceeded its annual budget - a danger to our democratic
system, which relies on the legislative power of the purse to control
executive agencies.

Lured by money that is often free from legislative or judicial
supervision many police officers have effectively become bounty hunters.

A report by the district attorney in Ventura County, Calif., said a
30-person law enforcement team killed Donald Scott in 1992 after
storming his Malibu house based on a phony tip that he was growing
marijuana.

The report said the team hoped to obtain Scott's ranch through
forfeiture; it had previously appraised the property at $5-million.

Ready cash and minimal accountability also encourage law-enforcement
agencies to steal. Last month, a court found that the New York State
Organized Task Force had illegally taken $1.5-million in forfeited
funds that were supposed to go to wrongfully fired air freight clerks.

State and local law-enforcement agencies share in forfeiture largesse
by having their drug seizures "adopted" by the federal government,
even though the federal government may have had little to do with the
seizure.

When a forfeiture is adopted, federal officials turn back at least 80
percent of the proceeds to the local law-enforcement agency. This
allows state and local law-enforcement agencies to glom onto funds
that would go elsewhere under state law.

In Missouri, law-enforcement agencies kept up to $32- million in drug
forfeiture proceeds that legislature had allocated to public schools.

Although the Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act eliminates some gross
civil liberties violations, it leaves unchanged the economic incentive
to overreach.

A prime example of that overreach is a recent case in which the U.S.
Department of Justice tried to seize $109,327 in charitable
contributions intended for destitute Guatemalan orphans.

New York's 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denounced "the corrupting
incentives of this arrangement: We see aggressive but marginal claims
asserted ... to seize charitable funds ... so that the money can be
diverted for expenditure by the Department of justice."

Forfeiture proceeds must go to government general funds, rather than
law enforcement agency budgets. It's time to unplug the forfeiture
cash machine.