John Adams is famously supposed to have said that the American legal system was fit only for a religious and moral people, wholly inadequate for any other society. I don't have a source for that, but whether he said it or not, it is a valid point. In this article by Sarah Stillman, Stillman discusses the use and abuse of Civil Forfeiture in modern law enforcement.
"The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime...In general, you needn't be found guilty to have your assets claimed by law enforcement; in some states, suspicion on a par with “probable cause” is sufficient. Nor must you be charged with a crime, or even be accused of one. Unlike criminal forfeiture, which requires that a person be convicted of an offense before his or her property is confiscated, civil forfeiture amounts to a lawsuit filed directly against a possession, regardless of its owner’s guilt or innocence."
The practice began with the prosecution of pirates and smugglers, where it was easier to prosecute the ship you had instead of the captain who was somewhere on the ocean thousands of miles away. The practice was used later to help fund anti-drug operations, then expanded further with the Comprehensive Crime Control Act in 1984 which allowed a large percentage of the confiscated funds to be returned to local law enforcement by the federal government. This helps get funds out of the hands of drug cartels which are currently lopping heads off on the U.S.-Mexico border, and into the hands of underfunded law enforcement agencies.
The problem arises with incidents like those recorded in Stillman's article, when local police use the law to fleece law abiding citizens. Officers will target rental and out of state vehicles, stop them for minor or made up offences like speeding or driving too close to the white line. Once stopped, they offer the driver two options, be charged incarcerated and charged, or sign over their valuables to the city. In one instance two parents were told their child would be taken away and placed in a foster home if they did not sign over their cash. I encourage you to take the time to read the article, it lays out a very interesting view of our law enforcement that it is our responsibility to hold accountable.
This is the reason that a government of limited powers operated by virtuous citizens is a good idea. What we have in Civil Forfeiture is a piece of legislation, like many passed by our government, that has great potential to do good. Many of us would agree that confiscating drug money and funding local law enforcement with that money isn't a bad idea. However, the law's potential to be abused is just as great if not greater. Few of us would agree that innocent people being harassed in this manner is a good thing.
The knee jerk reaction that many of us have is that there needs to be a new law, a new oversight committee, some government action that will solve the problem. But all the laws in the world will not stop humans from behaving like humans. The IRS has oversight committees, the NSA has oversight committees, and every citizen sits on the presidential oversight committee. Yet in the last few months we have discovered that the IRS has been discriminating in a horrific manner based on organization's political leanings, the NSA has been performing unprecedented surveillance on our own citizens, and Benghazi continues to be at best a grisly monument to the stupidity of our government or at worst an act of treason.
We have long looked to the government as the solution to our problems, and are now discovering like the ancient Greeks that the ruler's power to do good is equal to its power to do evil.
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