CIVIL-FORFEITURE LAWS BEING ABUSED

A recent Los Angeles Times article tracked a disturbing trend among
law-enforcement agencies nationwide: using civil-forfeiture laws to
take the property of people accused of participating in crimes.

Los Angeles police and city officials boast about using the laws to
reduce crimes such as street racing. The article reported that racing
incidents have been reduced in the San Fernando Valley because police
simply confiscate the cars of those they accuse of illegal racing.

Police agencies increasingly are using civil-forfeiture laws because
the property can be seized even if its owner is never convicted of a
crime. (Under criminal-forfeiture laws, a defendant can lose his
property after being convicted of a crime.)

Technically, in civil forfeitures, officials file suit against the
property itself for having been involved in illegal activity.
Officials seize the property and then force the owner to hire legal
help to try to win it back.

In addition to the basic unfairness of seizing property absent a
conviction, there are other problems with this form of law
enforcement.

For starters, as the New Jersey Supreme Court noted in striking down a
portion of that state's civil-forfeiture law, the laws set up enormous
conflicts of interest. Police and prosecutors' offices get to keep
proceeds from the seizures, which "provides to those in prosecutorial
functions financial interests which are not remote as to escape the
taint of impermissible bias ... prohibited by the due process clauses
of the New Jersey and U.S. constitutions."

Many police agencies and district attorneys' offices rely heavily on
the millions of dollars in proceeds from seizing property to build
their budgets.

In the New Jersey case, police took a woman's 1990 Ford Thunderbird
after her son was caught selling marijuana in it. It took a long legal
battle, waged by the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Justice, to
get the car back.

According to the Times article, police in Los Angeles are taking the
vehicles not only of alleged street racers, but of those accused of
buying or selling drugs. Two Los Angeles City Council members now want
to confiscate the cars of those who are accused of drunken driving.

Thus, a joint of marijuana or a blood-alcohol level of .08 could cost
a person not a few hundred dollars in fines, but a $30,000 automobile.
That is neither fair nor proportional.

Congress passed federal civil-forfeiture reform in 2000, but clearly
more needs to be done by states to rein in abuses.