Civil Forfeiture Came From a Strange Place

One of the central criticisms of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s effort to roll back Obama-era restrictions on civil forfeiture is that it would reassert powers best left in the 1980s, when the War on Drugs raged. But the roots of the controversial practice is far older, and stranger, than that.

Unlike criminal forfeiture, when the state seizes the property of someone found guilty of a crime, civil forfeiture rests on a curious legal fiction: that the property seized is “guilty” of a crime and can therefore be confiscated by the state’s law enforcement officers independent of a criminal proceeding. For example, police officers can seize a car they believe was used to deliver drugs -- even if the owner of the car wasn’t suspected, much less convicted, of a crime.