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The Pros And Cons Of Civil Forfeiture

1546 Words7 Pages

One muggy summer evening in 2008, Joseph Gardner, an elderly man working as a cashier at a local convenience store on the outskirts of Seattle, Washington, took his last customer of the day, a barrel-chested young police officer, and locked up for the night. While driving his beat up old van home, he noticed that the same police car he’d seen in his store’s parking lot was shadowing him, and had been for the last couple miles. Only three blocks from his home in the suburbs, the patrol car pulled Joseph over to the side of the road. Knocking on his window, the officer asked Gardner if he knew that he’d switched lanes without using his turn signal. Gardner replied that no, he had no idea and must have forgotten. Did Gardner have anything illegal …show more content…

Under this law, government agencies like the police are allowed to confiscate things from the populace that they think were obtained illegally. An example of such would be a police department having a cruiser with a bumper sticker that says “This used to be a drug dealer’s car! Now it’s ours!” Hundreds of federal laws allow forfeiture to be used on innumerable illegalities like underground fight clubs, drug rings, money won from people gambling in basements, and the like. One terrible thing about civil forfeiture is that you don’t need to be convicted or found guilty of a crime to have your possessions forfeited to the authorities. In some states, the level of suspicion of probable cause is enough for the police to crack down. In fact, it isn’t necessary for you to even be accused of a crime, let alone actually charged for one. Civil forfeiture is different from criminal forfeiture in that criminal forfeiture requires that a person be convicted of some crime before their property can be seized. Civil forfeiture is what happens when a lawsuit is filed directly against someone’s property instead of the person who owns said property. This has lead to some hilariously amusing case names, including United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency and United States v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark

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