It’s getting harder to hit innocent Coloradans over the head with civil forfeiture laws.
If you live in the Rocky Mountain State and the police want to grab some of your stuff on the basis of a suspicion (or a claimed suspicion) that you have committed a crime, you’re better off today than you would have been a few weeks ago.
Colorado has become the second state of the union to entitle you to a lawyer if police are seizing your property.
The new law also requires “a conviction of the nonowner criminal defendant before the noninnocent owner’s property may be forfeited,” which is a little nonclear but means, if enforced properly, that authorities in the state will not be able to greedily grab your property on grounds of mere suspicion that you or some good buddy of yours has committed a crime.
One needs civil forfeiture laws to disrupt organized crime, say supporters. But Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella points out how much evidence has piled up over the years showing how easily civil forfeiture can be abused. And how frequently it has in fact been abused. Undoubtedly, civil forfeiture laws have “created perverse profit incentives for police departments and lacked due process protections for innocent property owners.”
State by state — or in all states at once, if Congress can help in a way that survives judicial challenges — the incentives must be wiped out.
Due process for innocent people subject to the confiscations must be ensured.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with Nano Banana
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One reply on “Our Property, Not Their Loot”
Political theory usually imagines states as creations of communities, intended to repel external marauders and to bring order within these communities.
Historically, though, states have more often originated in plunderers deciding that they could do as well or better by claiming a territory as by nomadic pillaging. The logic of Laffer curves would limit how much the plunderers took, and motivate them to repel rivial parasites.
Sadly, even states created by those seeking justice or mutual benefit within the wider community have a tendency to degenerate into gangs of plunderers.
What makes this transformation possible is an unwillingness on the part of many to accept the constraints that follow from a liberal notion of rights. Excuses are found to censor, to disarm, to expropriate, and to presume guilt. Most of those from the general public who accept these excuses don’t recognize that they are really supporting the embrace of a feudal or pre-feudal political order.