Why is civil forfeiture such a conspiracy bugaboo in the first place?
That group then founded a culture around this odd distrust of monarchs, that in later generations became a distrust of governments in all forms - even going as far as to conjure fantastical secret societies like the 'illuminati' that maintain a strong thumb on the scales of justice.
It's just a part of the psyche that built the U.S.A. - it's a feature, not a bug
Much of the rhetoric was dressed up as against taxes, but really all of the actual action was against unfairness in government (especially the lack of taxes). A worthy goal, and a decent reason to revolt. But I wish current politics would occasionally get the facts right.
In other words, if you have $500 in cash, the police can say, "I suspect that is being used in a drug deal," with no actual evidence, and they take your $500. It will cost you around $2500 in attorney fees to try to get it back. The federal government also gets a cut. In 2010, this accounted for about 2.5 billion dollars in revenue, no trial required.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
"Civil forfeiture in the United States, also called civil asset forfeiture or civil judicial forfeiture,[1] is a process in which law enforcement officers take assets from persons suspected of involvement with crime or illegal activity without necessarily charging the owners with wrongdoing."
I'm surprised you haven't heard about this. It's been going on for decades.
No, civil asset forfeiture is an ongoing problem and 2010 is not some unusual outlier.
As the original article states:
>...Still, boil down all the numbers and caveats above and you arrive at a simple fact: In the United States, in 2014, more cash and property transferred hands via civil asset forfeiture than via burglary.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/11/23/cops-...
Looking more broadly:
>...Since 2000, states and the federal government have forfeited at least $68.8 billion—that we know of. Not all states provided full data, so this figure drastically undercounts property taken from people through forfeiture.
https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
And to reiterate, I agree with you that there needs to be changes to civil forfeiture. I just think we should be honest about the numbers and reasoning we use in that debate.
The article addresses this issue:
>..."In a given year, one or two high-dollar cases may produce unusually large amounts of money — with a portion going back to victims — thereby telling a noisy story of year-to-year activity levels," the Institute for Justice explains. A big chunk of that 2014 deposit, for instance, was the $1.7 billion Bernie Madoff judgment, most of which flowed back to the victims.
>For that reason, the net assets of the funds are usually seen as a more stable indicator — those numbers show how much money is left over in the funds each year after the federal government takes care of various obligations, like payments to victims. Since this number can reflect monies taken over multiple calendar years, it's less comparable to the annual burglary statistics. Still, even this more stable indicator hit $4.5 billion in 2014, according to the Institute for Justice — higher again than the burglary losses that year.
>...Also burglaries are basically never justified, but sometimes civil forfeitures are justified.
Criminal forfeitures are done after someone has been convicted and are justified. Civil forfeitures on the other hand are done before anyone has been convicted and the victim doesn't get free legal representation and is assumed guilty until proven innocent. Police agencies have to be funded, but it shouldn't be done by stealing from the public.
I have said elsewhere in this thread that the burden of proof shouldn't be on the owner to prove innocence, but I'm not sure simply changing that turns it into criminal forfeiture. My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime. Meanwhile civil forfeiture can happen when the crime is committed by someone else (technically the item being forfeited).
Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly. Other people benefited from Madoff's crimes without being aware that crimes were being committed. I think it is acceptable for that third party profit to be forfeited despite the owners not committing a crime.
It gives a sense of the scale of the abuse. A number of states refused to give out the data, so it is a low estimate.
>...My understanding is that criminal forfeiture only happens when the owner is convicted of a crime.
Yes, and that is justifiable. Abuses like confiscating a person's money because they went on a domestic airline flight with a large amount of cash are not justifiable.
>...Back to the Madoff example, not all of the money was taken from Madoff directly.
It is a mistake to just focus on a large forfeiture as that is rare:
>...Data from 21 states show half of all currency forfeitures are worth less than $1,300, hardly the stuff of vast criminal enterprises and far less than it would cost to hire an attorney to fight back.
https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
>Carl J. Shapiro and various related people and entities have agreed to forfeit $625 million to the United States, all of which will be made available to the victims of the fraudulent investment advisory business which was owned and operated by Bernard L. Madoff
[1] - https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/201...
Bernie Madoff turned himself in and was convicted. Sounds like they could have seized the money some other way.
So the 2010 thing is just a coincidence and either isn't included in the equitable sharing agreement, or if it is, it shows the Madoff seizure is just a drop in the bucket. Either way, it's pretty bad.
The easy fix for civil forfeiture is assign the burden of proof to the state, not the citizen. Some states have done this very thing.
If by "reform" you mean "complete elimination", then I agree.
Civil forfeiture is such a clear and obvious violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. How it lasted more than even a few DAYS before being struck down by even the lowest level courts is beyond me.
Of course the practice got expanded to contexts and situations that have nothing to do with smuggling because government will use any excuse to expand its powers.
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/seize-first-questi...