SOME CRITICS FEAR FORFEITURE LAW HAS 'MUSHROOMED' BEYOND REASON

Civil Forfeiture Laws Are Nothing New To The United States.

Founding father John Hancock's own boat, the schooner Liberty, was forfeit
to the British Crown after he refused to pay an unpopular customs duty on
its cargo of wine.

But while undeclared, counterfeit or contraband items coming across the
border always have been subject to confiscation, civil asset forfeiture was
rare until 1984.

With the Omnibus Crime Bill of that year, Congress expanded the forfeiture
laws to apply to drug offenses, and more than 200 others, including making
a false statement on a bank loan application, or failing to report the
purchase of $3,000 in money orders within 24 hours to the Internal Revenue
Service.

"Criminal forfeiture has always been available in the courts," said former
Maryland Congressman Robert Bauman. He worked with House Judiciary
Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill., on his book on the dangers of
forfeiture and is on the board of directors of FEAR -- Forfeiture Endangers
American's Rights.

"When a person is tried for a crime and proven beyond a reasonable doubt
guilty, the court can decide to seize their money. With civil forfeiture,
80 percent of the people whose property is taken are never charged with a
crime, and most of them cannot afford to fight it to get their property
back," he said.

In addition to expanding the number of offenses that trigger forfeiture,
the Omnibus Crime Bill allowed drug money and drug-related assets to be
funneled back to the law enforcement agencies responsible for seizing them.

"The original rationale in giving the funds to the police was that it
offset the costs," said Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice
Policy Foundation, who helped write some of the drug forfeiture laws as
counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for nine years. He later helped
found FEAR.

"So if I'm the DEA and I seize a boat, I have to moor that boat somewhere,
there are going to be dockage fees, I have to maintain the boat, I have to
guard the boat -- the idea at least was to let the seizure program pay the
costs of the seizure program.

"Then it sort of mushroomed ... (and) there became a sense of entitlement
- -- we seized it, it's ours, like we kill it, we eat it," Mr. Sterling said.

The same thing was happening in state legislatures.

While some state laws are more restrictive on what can be seized, if the
federal government is involved in the investigation, federal forfeiture law
applies.

"One of the common abuses is the evasion of state laws regarding how the
money should be spent -- that is often done in conjunction with the federal
government," Mr. Sterling said.

"If the federal law allows a federal forfeiture to be shared with the law
enforcement agencies that participate in the seizure and if you have a
state law that says these funds should be turned over to a specific
purpose, you'll find law enforcement agencies collaborating with federal
law enforcement and federal prosecutors to steer the forfeiture through the
federal system to avoid the state laws."

The 1984 changes in the law had a dramatic effect.

From 1985 to 1992, the total value of federal asset seizures increased more
than 1,500 percent.

Today, forfeiture law generates a half-billion dollars a year in revenue
for the Department of Justice alone, and close to $1 billion a year between
all federal agencies combined.

As of 1994, the Justice Department had transferred almost $1.4 billion in
forfeited assets to state and local law enforcement agencies.

Conservative estimates are that $7 billion to $8 billion has gone into the
hands of the police at federal, state, and local levels in the last 20
years, Mr. Bauman said.