The Cambridge Township police department in Lenawee County has a new unmarked vehicle, a 2008 Dodge Charger, which was paid for directly out of cash seized in drug trafficking cases.

Chief Larry Wibbeler told the Michigan Messenger that this small community of fewer than 6,000 people near Adrian could afford the purchase because of one large drug bust of a major dealer: “We had one that was almost $300,000 in 2006, including the vehicles. He had been selling pills, marijuana, cocaine and crack, mostly to younger kids.” Under state and federal law, assets like cash, vehicles and homes that are either the result of or used to facilitate a crime may be seized by law enforcement and the agency that makes the bust gets to keep most of it for themselves. These are called asset forfeiture laws.

Asset forfeiture is most common in drug cases, but the law allows seizures in any criminal case. In one infamous case in Michigan, a Royal Oak man who was caught engaging a prostitute in his car had that vehicle seized by police. The man’s wife tried to get the car back because it was registered in both of their names, but she had paid for it and needed the vehicle to transport her five children to and from school, especially since she had left her husband after this incident. In 1994, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled against her and upheld the seizure of the vehicle, which was then sold and the proceeds went to the police department.

Continued – 

Sometimes there’s so much money involved that different law enforcement agencies get into a battle over who gets the money. Such is the case in Lima, Ohio, right now in a case where more than $400,000 was seized without the victim of that seizure even being charged with a crime. Meredith and Luther Ricks both worked in a foundry for more than 40 years. They didn’t trust banks, so they saved their money in a safe in their home. Last summer, two men tried to break into their home. In the melee that followed, the Ricks’ son was stabbed and Luther managed to get his gun and shoot one of the intruders, scaring off the other.

When police arrived at the scene, they found a small amount of marijuana in the house — Luther uses it to ease the pain from arthritis and a hip replacement — and used that as a pretext for seizing all of the money they had in the safe, more than $400,000. They didn’t charge Luther with anything. He had acted in self-defense and there wasn’t even enough marijuana there to charge him with possession. But they seized the cash anyway. Shortly thereafter the FBI got involved, not to fix the situation but to claim that the money should be turned over to the federal government rather than the local police. Bob Ewing of the Institute for Justice, discussing this case in an op-ed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, said:

The FBI’s adoption of the Lima police’s forfeiture is not unusual – the federal government regularly seizes property that was originally confiscated by local authorities and then splits the resulting profits. In Missouri, for example, authorities were recently caught turning forfeitures over to the federal government in order to avoid a legal requirement that proceeds go to schools.

Some states have reformed their laws to help prevent these kinds of abuses, and the federal government attempted a relatively weak set of reforms in 2000. But as Ewing notes, there’s still a serious problem:

While criminal forfeiture requires that a property owner be found guilty of a crime beyond a reasonable doubt, civil forfeiture does not require that the owner even be accused of a crime, much less convicted. The government proceeds directly against the property it wants to take, which means owners are not entitled to any of the protections they would receive if they were accused of a crime.

In another recent case, this one in Montana, police seized more than $130,000 in cash from a man who was pulled over for speeding and charged with DUI. They did this because they presumed that anyone carrying that much cash must be involved in drug dealing, but they never even charged him with such a crime, much less convicted him. The Montana Supreme Court upheld that seizure as valid in June of last year. Chief Wibbeler says that would never be allowed in his county, telling the Messenger that the local prosecutors there “would never allow us to seize assets without a conviction. Every seizure we’ve been involved in has had a conviction.”

That’s good news locally but it bucks the national reality, which Ewing calls “one of the most profound assaults on our rights today.” Daniel Ray, professor of constitutional law at Cooley Law School’s Oakland County campus, says that while it’s laudable that the particular asset seizure that allowed Cambridge Township to purchase this new vehicle was the result of a legitimate forfeiture pursuant to a conviction, that stands in sharp contrast to the frequent abuse of the forfeiture authority:

The original premise behind forfeiture laws is rather unobjectionable: deter criminal activity by removing the profit motive. Unfortunately, law enforcement agencies quickly came to understand how they could profit through aggressive use — and all too often — abuse, of forfeiture laws.

Forfeiture laws turn many of our bedrock constitutional principles, like the presumption of innocence and due process of law, on their head. In practice, often little more than a naked assertion by law enforcement that property was used in, associated with, or is the fruit of criminal activity suffices to carry the burden of proof. It then falls to the property owner to rebut that finding — essentially, to prove a negative. To make matters worse, many property owners reasonably decide that the thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars it will cost to fight a forfeiture outweighs the value of the forfeited property and the chances of ultimate success. It comes as no surprise, then, that forfeiture laws are used most aggressively against those who are not in a position to fight back.

Michigan has a long history of controversial forfeiture cases that fit that profile, many of which were detailed in a paper from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. While we don’t have more recent data, the paper notes that as of 1998, Michigan police had used the forfeiture laws nearly 10,000 times and had seized more than $14 million in cash and property.