On Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced major new limits on asset forfeiture. In a nutshell, he put a stop to the federal civil forfeiture of assets seized by state and local law enforcement and “adopted” under the Equitable Sharing program. The details are a little fuzzy, but this may be a very big deal in the world of forfeiture, for reasons I discuss below. What the program was. For years, the federal government has used federal civil forfeiture law to obtain ownership of property seized by state and local law enforcement, and to give a portion of the value of that property back to the agency that made the seizure. For example, a local police officer in North Carolina might conduct a traffic stop, obtain consent to search the vehicle, and find $20,000 in cash in the glove compartment. Suspecting the driver of drug activity, the officer might seize the cash. Regardless of whether the officer charged the driver with a crime, federal authorities might “adopt” the case and initiate forfeiture proceedings to obtain ownership of the cash, and might then return 80 percent of the cash to the officer’s agency. The program, called Equitable Sharing, is detailed in United States Department of Justice, Guide to Equitable Sharing for State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies (2009). This has been a popular program for several reasons. First, once federal civil forfeiture proceedings begin, forfeiture is very likely to result. Compressing the law a bit, the government’s burden of proof in such [...]
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