Abolishing Civil Asset Forfeiture and Eminent Domain

According to the ACLU, “Every year, federal and state law enforcement agents seize millions of dollars from civilians during traffic stops, simply by asserting that they believe the money is connected to some illegal activity and without ever pursuing criminal charges.” Unsurprisingly, these procedures are legal and facilitated through federal and state laws, leaving police agencies to routinely abuse civil asset forfeiture schemes and greedily seize property and money for their own use. Thus, to prevent this shameless violation of individual liberties, civil asset forfeiture must be abolished; and eventually the extensive power it is derived from: eminent domain.

Although asset forfeiture regulations are mostly created at the state level, the federal government has expanded civil asset forfeiture through “The Department of Justice's Equitable Sharing Program, established in 1984, [which] pushes for local agencies to participate in joint investigations with them in exchange for receiving a share of the assets seized”. These assets are then delivered into the participating law enforcement agencies. “More than 7,000 law enforcement agencies participate in this program, and more than $2.7 billion has been shared with law enforcement agencies since 2009.”

However, the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties oriented legal group, states “80 percent of the people who have been targeted by federal civil asset forfeiture programs were never even charged with a crime.” Since the process is governed under civil, but not criminal rules, the government releases itself from the liability of the court system. Consequently, individuals who seek to obtain their property from the State are left in a tangling web of confusing civil regulations that require the assistance of a lawyer. Then, they must go through an expensive legal process that encourages the requester to quickly abandon the process. Today, the process is frequently abused and not employed against criminals as originally intended, but on innocent small business owners and individuals.

Nevertheless, Senator Rand Paul has introduced a bill called the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act that doesn’t abolish forfeiture entirely and leaves the burden of proof to the same “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Despite these negative characteristics, the legislation would prevent law enforcement from profiting off of these practices.

Nonetheless, this solution is not enough. The ability of government to seize property for “public use” must be abolished as it allows these liberty violating schemes to progress and encourage hostility and aggressiveness among police agencies against the people.