The Supreme Court appears ready to put a check on civil asset forfeiture.Jason Snead and Elizabeth Slattery write:
The case at issue involves a man named Tyson Timbs, who sold $225 worth of heroin to undercover police officers on two occasions, as a means of raising money to support his own drug habit. Police arrested Timbs while he was driving to a third drug deal, and he ultimately pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to a year of home confinement and five years of probation, and assessed roughly $1,200 in court costs and fees. Then the state of Indiana moved to forfeit the vehicle he was driving that day: a $42,000 Land Rover, which Timbs purchased with funds from his father’s life insurance policy. […]
[S]eizing a $42,000 car as an instrumentality in a minor drug offense, the maximum criminal fine for which was $10,000, raised an important question: Was the seizure of Timbs’ car unconstitutional under the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment? […]
When Justice Stephen Breyer asked Fisher whether, under his theory, “a state needing revenue” could forfeit every vehicle found merely to be speeding, Fisher responded, “Yes.”
Several justices seemed perturbed by the implication that states and localities would be able to levy otherwise unconstitutional fines merely by saying they are forfeitures.
Many law enforcement agencies already treat forfeiture as an easy means of seizing their way to bigger budgets. Each year, hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and property are forfeited and the revenues subsequently spent with little oversight or accountability.
Timbs’ attorney, Wesley Hottot of the public interest law firm the Institute for Justice, picked up on this, arguing that exempting forfeitures from the Excessive Fines Clause would permit “governments at all levels to impose constitutionally excessive civil in rem forfeitures based on nothing more than a label.” […]
[T]he court can—and likely will—hold that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against excessive fines are incorporated against the state, leaving the more complicated question of how to define an “excessive” civil forfeiture to another day.
If it does, the court will have delivered a significant victory for the property and due process rights of millions of Americans.
[Jason Snead and Elizabeth Slattery, “The Supreme Court Signals It May Rein in Abusive Property Seizures,” The Daily Signal, November 30]
