Amid growing national concern over the practice of so-called civil asset forfeiture, bipartisan support has swelled in California to reform the practice, with a new bill poised to add Assembly to Senate approval.
An emerging consensus
Asset forfeiture, wherein law enforcement retains property or cash seized in the course of an arrest, has come under broad criticism from the political Left and Right.
Predictably, libertarians have trained their political and legal fire on the practice. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Institute for Justice attorney Robert Everett Johnson warned that asset forfeiture had short-circuited due process. “People around the country are having their money taken, based on the barest suspicion that they might be involved in some sort of drug offense without ever bringing the case before a jury or convicting them of a crime,” he said. The California ACLU has recently thrown its weight behind legislation reforming asset forfeiture.
But liberals have also attacked its role in civil rights abuses, while conservatives have bridled at its dismissive approach toward property rights — and its increasing use as a source of government funding. At the national level, conservative justice reform groups, such as Right on Crime, have singled out asset forfeiture as a rule of law problem. “Our Constitution is meant to be a shield against this sort of arbitrary and capricious over-extension of government power, but to this point, most states — and the federal government — have very lackluster protections in place,” two Right on Crime supporters editorialized in the Washington Examiner. West Coast conservatives raised the alarm when, in recent months, several California cities were accused of cashing on through asset forfeiture — “at a time of dwindling police budgets, potentially creating pressure on cops to make more seizures,” as the Los Angeles Times reported this spring.
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