well, it's nice that you feel that way. but unfortunately very few others seem to. BUT, it just puzzles me that you "discover" these little tidbits from time to time and post them as new developments. I just wish you'd do some legwork before posting inflammatory headers and day to day proceedings as if they are revelations. I just personally think it would help your case if you'd do some rudimentary research and post something along the lines of:
hey tfp, I've been looking at the development of asset seizure legislation and it's expansion to encroach upon what I view as fundamental protections of citizen property. I realize the current legislation, enacted almost a decade ago, was spurred by public sentiment to do something, anything, about narcotics trafficking, but it just doesn't seem to balance this notion of rights of citizens versus ability to apprehend criminals and/or circumvent their behavior for me.
and then propose what you would do in place of asset forfeiture to address the reality that it's more often than not difficult (some might argue even impossible) to adequately stop narcotic crime under a more traditional understanding of how the justice system should work.
if you thought this out more extensively, my hope would be that you would begin to form consistent opinions across the board. and by that I mean I would like to see you examine your thoughts regarding "victims rights" vs. those of the accused and stuffs like that. I'm not downing you, I just think I'd be more interested in the conversation if it went along these lines.
in any case, I dug this up for you and figured that, given your interest in the history of things, you'd like to know the roots of the 2000 reform act that these forfeitures currently operate under:
Quote:
Civil Forfeiture’s Dubious Legal Pedigree
How did such laws come to be viewed as compatible with the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and a fair trial?
In pre-Civil War America, as under English common law, civil forfeiture proceedings were used only to enforce customs laws and admiralty laws against piracy. Because criminal convictions of smugglers and pirates who were outside the jurisdiction of domestic courts were unlikely, the government cleverly devised the legal fiction of in rem civil suits, by which it could sue things rather than their owners. This allowed it to confiscate and liquidate smuggled goods, pirate loot or suspect ships without the burden of having to prove the criminal intent of a ship’s owner. And since the suits were civil rather than criminal, they were held to be exempt from the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause.
The scope of civil forfeiture widened significantly during the Civil War with passage of the 1861 Confiscation Acts, which authorized the seizure of property owned by Confederates and their abettors. Challenged on constitutional grounds, the Act was upheld by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the Acts’ suspension of due process was a legitimate exercise of war power.
Encouraged by the Court, Congress soon expanded civil forfeiture to enforce revenue provisions unrelated to traditional civil forfeiture concerns. In the precedent-setting case Dobbins’s Distillery v. United States (1877), the Court upheld the civil forfeiture of a distillery for liquor-tax violations, arguing that any “conviction of the wrongdoer must be obtained, if at all, in another and wholly independent proceeding.” Thus, the Court established that any kind of property - personal or real - is subject to civil forfeiture so long as the government labels its enforcement actions “civil” rather than “criminal.”
An entire century passed before the Court stepped completely through the doorway it had entered in the Confiscation Act cases and Dobbins’s. In Calero-Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co. (1974), the Court dropped the presumption-of-innocence principle and placed the burden of proof on the defendant, thus encouraging Congress to write the controversial civil forfeiture provisions in the 1988 Drug Act.
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http://www.independent.org/publicati...e=summary&id=3