Twenty-five states have already started to reform their civil asset forfeiture laws, 14 states now require a criminal conviction before the government can seize cash, property, or home, and 3 states have outright banned the practice outright. A law proposed earlier this year in Alabama promises to ban the practice altogether in the state and require a criminal conviction to conduct asset forfeiture. These are promising developments as more and more people realize that there should be some-sort of conviction prerequisite before assets are seized. This is all well and good, but the practice should be ended outright and ended on a federal level if complete progress is to be made.

These laws were originally put in place to help with the war on drugs, to target cartels, kingpins, gangs, money-launders and seize their assets bought with illegally obtained money. This, however, has not been the result of these laws. The poor, and minorities, are more disproportionately affected by these laws as they stomp of the constitutional notion of innocent until proven guilty. In this article, we will examine the shortcomings of this program and what should be done to change these draconian laws.

A recent study done in Alabama analyzed forfeiture cases in 14 counties and found that half of those cases involved less than 1,372 dollars. What makes this worse is that Alabama law allows 100 percent of the proceeds to go directly into the agencies handling the forfeiture case. This led to 70 agencies across the state netting a total of 2.2 million dollars from the cases they brought in 2015, and 676,790 of that was taken from people never even charged with a crime. These laws create a strong incentive for these agencies to use civil asset forfeiture not just as a law enforcement technique, but as a source of revenue. Moreover, since many impacted by these laws are poor, many can not win these cases. This is why Alabama wins 80 percent of these cases, and 52% of these cases are uncontested by the state because the person simply cannot afford the financial burden caused by the lawsuit.

This practice is just as bad in Chicago as well. In Cook County, three-fourths of all the seizures were performed in Chicago. The average value of the seizure was 4,553 dollars, but the median was a striking 1,049 dollars and over three-fourths of all seizures were in cash, not property. Mapping these seizures showed that they were more frequent in the South and West Side which are notably poorer than the rest of Chicago, and are more predominantly Black than the surrounding areas. Roughly 11,000 seizures were for 1,000 dollars or less and 1,500 seizures were for 100 dollars or less. When you remove the larger seizures from the map, these petty seizures are almost all in the south and west side of Chicago. The larger seizures, so too, are also more likely to be tied to a larger crime, these petty seizures are not. Since all the police need is a preponderance of illegal use they can snatch almost anything, they have even snatched a Call of Duty game.

A report released in late 2017 by the Nevada Policy Research Institute found that the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department raked in 1.9 million asset forfeiture revenue in 2016 and two-thirds of those seizures occurred in low-income zip codes with a greater concentration of minorities. The 12 Las Vegas zip codes most targeted had an average poverty rate of 27 percent, compared to an average poverty rate of 12 percent in the other 36 zip codes. In Las Vegas, just like Cook County, more than half the seizures were for less than 1,000 dollars. One seizure even reached 74 cents.

These statistics are truly terrifying when you realize that it is not just in these cities and states, it can happen in most parts of the country. These things are happening to real people every day and it must end. Alabama Businessman, Frank Ranelli had his merchandise of 130 computers seized after a tip that dealing in stolen goods. He proved himself innocent, and 7 years later, he still hadn't got his property back. Tan Nguyen won 50,000 in casino winnings but soon lost it all when a suspicious police officer seized every last dime and threatened to tow his car if he wasn't quite. George Reby had 22,000 dollars in his car as he traveled through Tennessee. He was stopped and this money was confiscated despite his claims that he was using the money to buy a new car, which was later proven, but the cop failed to mention this in this report. Cases like this go on and on and on, and it is time to put it to an end.

Civil asset forfeiture operates under a legal fiction that property, that cash, that houses can be guilty of a crime even if the owner were to never be charged with a crime. The reason this issue is so pervasive is that since this is not a criminal court and no one is being tried, the court operates under a preponderance of evidence preceding rather than the usual, beyond a reasonable doubt. All prosecutors must do is prove that the crime may likely be tied to illegal activity for it to be seized. The whole burden of proof falls on the defendant, they must now prove that the item was never used for illicit purposes. And, since it's property and it is not a criminal case, the owner is not given legal counsel, so all the costs to provide that is out of pocket, often time exceeding the value of what was seized. This is why 88 percent of federal cases involving civil asset forfeiture never actually see the inside of the courtroom.

New Mexico and Nebraska have passed the most sweeping reforms to date. Both states now require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited, and this doesn't mean that the property is immediately forfeited either. In New Mexico, the state must now prove that the owner had knowledge that the good was being used for illegal activity, rather than the defendant having to prove that he had no knowledge of it being used for criminal activity. So to does the bill make it so all extra revenue generated from forfeiture is deposited straight into the general fund rather than to the department that oversaw the process. It also includes provisions to curb the equitable sharing program in place with the federal government by placing stringent restrictions on what can be shared.

Nebraska has similar restrictions, although, admittedly less stringent, in place. However, Nebraska still has incentives in place for agencies to seize property because the revenue gained from it still goes back into drug enforcement, and this provision is embedded in the state's constitution. Many other states like Maryland, Florida, and Minnesota have all enacted procedural reforms, and even Washington D.C. has enacted strict reforms. But this is not enough; The federal government must end civil asset forfeiture once and for all.

The federal government has a program called equitable sharing, as mentioned above. No matter how much a state takes action against civil asset forfeiture, this policy supersedes it and limits the success of any comprehensive reforms. Once a federal forfeiture is completed, the federal agencies have a choice of keeping the proceeds or giving them out to state or local law enforcement offices that have helped with the seizure. In practice, this can be as much as 80 percent of all the proceeds. Since 2000, the Department of Treasury and Justice have dished out 5 billion dollars in revenues. These funds can only be spent by the seizing agency and only for law enforcement purposes, but the money is not subject to control by local and state legislatures. Many federal asset forfeitures are also done administratively, so they are free of any judicial involvement and the agency can keep the money.

If we are to truly encourage states to move away from this practice we must end equitable sharing and the practice all together at the federal level first. Which is, however, unlikely given our current Attorney General's opinion on the issue. But if we end the federal incentives to circumvent their state laws, the states can properly enforce their own laws on civil asset forfeiture. This issue has bipartisan support but yet nothing has been done because of the immense power it gives to the DOJ, DEA, DOT, and to policing agencies all across the country. Change needs to happen, we must end civil asset forfeiture once and for all. This is the first step of many in reforming our broken police and justice system in this country, all we need to do is actually take the step. Keep this issue in mind when voting for your elected officials this November and coming election years.