Pa. must reform civil forfeiture laws

There's nothing particularly civil about civil asset forfeiture.

These laws have for too long allowed federal, state, and local law enforcement to seize property and cash without granting citizens due process, based solely on the suspicion that the property has been involved in criminal activity. (At the federal level, the vast majority of property seized for forfeiture is never linked to any criminal conviction.)

Even worse, the cash forfeited and the proceeds from the sale of the forfeited property are often funneled back to the police departments and prosecutors' offices that took them in the first place. Besides being an unseemly conflict of interest, the laws also provide a perverse incentive for law enforcement to make seizures.

Lest there be any confusion, however, let's be clear: We do not object to the seizure of contraband taken from the criminal wrongdoings of drug dealers, money launderers, or other lawbreakers. Asset forfeiture can be a critical tool for law enforcement to combat criminal activity, but it is also a tool that can be abused, entangling innocent property owners with the costly and often Byzantine process of having to prove their property "innocent." All this without a right to counsel or any of the other rights we afford to people who have been charged with a crime. We need a system that protects everyday Pennsylvanians from abuses of the system.

Here in the Keystone State, officials have used the practice to forfeit, according to some estimates, more than $100 million worth of cash and property in the past decade alone. According to Louis Rulli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, from 2005 through 2012, in Philadelphia the government seized 670 houses, 1,697 cars, and $28 million in cash, for a total forfeited amount of nearly $40 million. He has said that civil asset forfeiture is big business at the expense of the hard-earned property of ordinary Pennsylvanians.

We should not be balancing state and local law enforcement budgets on the backs of innocent property owners.

And those whose property has been wrongly or unfairly forfeited should not have to spend thousands of dollars in lawyers' fees in an effort to get it back — and even then with no guarantee of success. Often it costs more to hire an attorney than the value of the property seized. The property is then permanently forfeited without a fight — again, in many cases, with the property owner never having been charged with a crime.

Civil asset forfeiture stands the American jurisprudential notion of "innocence until proven guilty" on its head. As its unfairness has been recognized, there has been a growing chorus of bipartisan calls for its reform. You know that time has come when FreedomWorks, the Commonwealth Foundation, and the American Civil Liberties Union work together to launch Fix Forfeiture, a new organization that will work to reform civil asset forfeiture laws in Pennsylvania and elsewhere.

The goals of reform are fivefold: Ensure that no one can have property forfeited without first being convicted of a crime; add due process protections for the people involved in an asset forfeiture; address conflicts of interest created when the government agency responsible for a forfeiture retains those assets; establish reporting requirements for government agencies that forfeit property; and exempt certain property from civil asset forfeiture laws that would create undue hardships for the owner.

HB 508, which I have introduced in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, would accomplish these goals.

The Pennsylvania Constitution states that "[A]ll men ... have certain inherent and indefeasible rights, among which are those of enjoying and defending life and liberty, of acquiring, possessing and protecting property." Civil asset forfeiture, as it increasingly has been practiced, is thoroughly incompatible with that.

Momentum is building, not just here in Pennsylvania, but across the country, to restore the presumption of innocence. In just the past two months, New Mexico and Montana have enacted strong reforms requiring a criminal conviction before government can seize someone's property and shifting the burden of proof back onto the government, where it rightly belongs.

Other states, including California and Michigan, are considering similar legislation to protect innocent property owners. Pennsylvania owes its residents no less.

Happily, reform of flawed civil asset forfeiture laws transcends ideological and partisan lines, as demonstrated by the coalition of state lawmakers supporting HB 508.

Fair civil asset forfeiture laws will protect our communities and improve the relationship between local law enforcement and the citizens they serve. And reform will make clear that law enforcement serves the citizens, not the other way around.

State Rep. Jim Cox (R.) represents Pennsylvania's 129th District, which includes parts of Berks and Lancaster Counties.  jcox@pahousegop.com