N.B. TARGETS TOOLS OF CRIME

Justice Minister To Introduce Forfeiture Legislation

Justice Minister Mike Murphy plans to introduce new legislation to
help battle criminal activity in New Brunswick's neighbourhoods.

Murphy says the Civil Forfeiture Act will target property used by
people to commit crimes. The province will launch lawsuits against
those individuals in an effort to have the court order them to
forfeit property used to commit an offence.

Murphy singles out people who deal drugs out of their homes or
produce and distribute child pornography from their homes.

"These people are bugs that need to be crushed," says the justice minister.

The province already has powers to seize property in criminal cases
and argue that judges should order it forfeited. It's been fairly
common over the last few years to see repeat drunk drivers ordered to
forfeit their vehicles or people running bawdy houses out of massage
parlours ordered to forfeit the property.

The province then disposes of the property, mainly through auction.

The Civil Forfeiture Act, which Murphy will introduce when the next
legislative session begins this month, won't involve Crown
prosecutors in criminal court. Instead, the province's lawyers will
take people to civil court, regardless of whether or not the person
has been convicted of a crime.

Murphy says if someone is charged, they will most likely let the
criminal proceeding play out before launching a civil action, but a
criminal conviction is not necessary.

"If they get acquitted, we can start legal action that same day,"
says the minister.

In criminal court, people are only convicted if the evidence shows
they committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, but in civil court,
decisions are based on the balance of probabilities, meaning the bar
to prove a case is lower. As an example, Murphy points out O.J.
Simpson was acquitted of murder back in the 1990s, but then lost the
civil case against him when he was found liable for the deaths of the
two people who were murdered.

Similar civil forfeiture legislation is already in place in countries
like the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom and several
provinces, including Ontario, B.C., Manitoba, Alberta, Quebec and Saskatchewan.

Murphy says he's spoken with his counterparts in other provinces and
they say this legislation is an important tool.

"In provinces like Ontario and B.C., they have a 100 per cent success
rate," he says.

Murphy says in those provinces, legal action is launched alleging the
defendant made himself a nuisance to the community by taking part in
illegal activity in a particular property. Most often the defendant
simply agrees to give up the property rather than fight it in court.

The justice minister says the goal is to protect communities from
people like child pornographers and drug dealers and to remove them
from these neighbourhoods by taking their property.

"We can root these scumbags out of our neighbourhoods and make it
quite lucrative for the province," says Murphy.

It's proven very lucrative for Ontario, which was the first province
to introduce this type of legislation. On Friday the attorney
general's office sent out a news release about how it purchased a new
mobile command vehicle for the London Police Service with funds from
the province's Civil Remedies Grant Program, created under the Civil
Remedies Act.

Ontario's civil forfeiture law allows the attorney general to ask the
civil court for an order to freeze, take possession of and forfeit to
the Crown, property that is determined to be a proceed or an
instrument of unlawful activity. Civil forfeiture legislation focuses
solely on the connection between property and unlawful activity and
is not dependant on any criminal charges or convictions.

From November 2003 to this past Friday, a total of $11.2 million in
property has been forfeited to the Ontario Crown through this
legislation. The province also has approximately $40 million in
property frozen pending the completion of civil forfeiture proceedings.

Under the act, the Ontario attorney general has successfully frozen
or had forfeited several biker clubhouses, crack houses, vehicles
used for street racing, almost 50 properties used as marijuana
grow-ops and much more. Millions of dollars generated for the
government from the sale of that property has been used for grants
for law enforcement agencies and compensation for victims of crimes.

According to the Ontario attorney general's office, in June 2005 a
constitutional challenge to the act was dismissed by Ontario Superior
Court which ruled the civil forfeiture of property does not infringe
on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In 2007, Ontario's Court of
Appeal upheld the lower court's decision.

Murphy says he will introduce the legislation this session and hopes
to have it passed some time after Christmas.

"I'll be surprised if there's any opposition to it," he says.