END REPREHENSIBLE POLICY OF SEIZING CIVILIANS' PROPERTY

Earlier in the decade, a young investigative reporter for Scripps Howard
with two Pulitzer Prizes in his pocket and a pit bull's tenacity discovered
a federal practice so despicable as to violate every assurance of justice
on which this country was founded.

It was called "civil asset forfeiture," and it allowed the government to
confiscate property of those who were merely suspected of being involved
tangentially or otherwise in criminal activity.

In a six-month inquiry, Andy Schneider uncovered one horror story after
another beginning with the plight of a Tennessee nurseryman whose
livelihood was interrupted on the mere suspicion that he was going to the
West Coast to buy drugs. In fact, he was innocently going there with cash
to buy plants for his nursery. He was never arrested or charged nor
anything and it took him several years to recover the money that had been
confiscated.

Now finally, Congress may be on the verge of doing away with one of the
most outrageous federal policies in the history of the Republic if members
of the Senate Judiciary Committee and, particularly their chairman, have
any sense.

The forfeiture of civil assets without due process has been going on too
long, and the House's overwhelming, bipartisan adoption of reforms (375-48)
should tell us all we need to know about the desirability of this act.
Seldom in history have so many disparate groups come together to end a
practice run amuck.

The bill sailed out of the House on the wind of an amazing
once-in-a-lifetime coalition of liberals and conservatives, tough-on-crime
forces, civil libertarians, gun advocates, bankers and groups of Realtors
and chambers of commerce. It would finally bring some justice to innocent
victims of what was thought to be a noble effort to enhance the war on
crime by turning the alleged fruits of those crimes against the criminals.

What clearly happened was something entirely different. The money became
more important than the rights of those from whom it was seized. The
Justice Department, FBI, law-enforcement agencies at all levels and their
lobbying organizations are furiously campaigning to keep the spigot open.
There are thousands of civil forfeiture cases each year, Justice Department
lawyers argue, and only about 1,200 of them are wrong.

Only 1,200? How nice.

They may have a shot at derailing things in the Senate, where the bill now
resides under control of Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. A Judiciary Committee
spokesman recently said that the chairman has "some problems" with the bill
chiefly sponsored by his House counterpart, Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois.
The spokesman declined to explain what the problems are.

The Hyde bill does not change the criminal forfeiture laws, which allow the
government to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of convicts. But it
completely alters the civil forfeiture laws under which federal agents have
been allowed to seize the assets of suspects without a hearing, a trial or
even an arrest.

The stories of abuse in this policy are legion, beginning with Schneider's
relating of the trials and tribulations of Willie Jones, who apparently fit
a profile and had the audacity to try to pay for an airplane ticket in cash.

Jones's tale, however, was just the tip of the iceberg. Recently it was
reported that the government had seized a motel in Houston because the
owners, who never were charged with anything, "had tacitly approved" of
drug activities by guests by failing to implement police security
recommendations. One of these was to raise the room charges.

It seems only right, does it not, that, as the bill states, officers should
be required to prove criminality and give notice before property is seized?
Isn't it just fair that judges would be able to release property to the
owner if continued government possession without proof of criminality would
pose a hardship?

This certainly doesn't seem like too radical an idea in this land of
much-heralded freedom. If Chairman Hatch has any idea of buying into the
greedy policies of the Justice Department, he should forget it, join his
House colleagues in making sure this wrong-headed law is corrected, and
write a letter of thanks to Andy Schneider.