IJ Announces Big Push, New Site for Asset Forfeiture Reform

The liberty-loving Institute
for Justice (IJ) has put together a new one-stop shop for info
explaining all the terrible problems with and government abuse of
civil asset forfeiture laws for you to share with any friends or
family who don’t quite get it. And there’s more to come.

Check out the easy-to-remember endforfeiture.com. Scroll down the
site and you’ll hit every piece of information you need to
illustrate the abuse problems and twisted incentives that come from
the government’s ability to seize assets from citizens through
civil processes without ever having to prove they committed a
crime. The site includes IJ’s videos and report about “Policing for
Profit,” as well as details about a handful of specific cases,

some of which will be
familiar to
regular Reason readers. And there will be more cases.

“We’re going to have a whole string of them coming out in the
next year,” says IJ Senior Attorney Scott Bullock. He is leading
the institute’s eight-member “forfeiture initiative team.”

The site, though, is not just about what IJ is doing to fight
asset forfeitures. It highlights the two
recently
introduced congressional bills to try to scale back the power
on the federal level to take citizens’ property without real due
process. It also offers some model legislation language that could
be used on the state level to reform the rules and reporting
requirements for asset forfeiture. The model legislation could be
used, for example, for citizens to craft a ballot initiative in
their states for an “end run” around government interests, Bullock
said.

“When Americans hear you can lose your property without
committing a crime, they can’t believe it,” Bullock said. “But
there are powerful interest groups on the other side that fight
tooth and nail to fight reform,” like the prosecutors and law
enforcement agencies who get the money from the forfeitures. Such
efforts have succeeded in Oregon and Utah, though unfortunately

Utah’s reforms were gutted last year.

IJ has had a string of successes lately, fighting licensing
regulations meant to hamstring everybody from
coffin-crafting monks to hair-braiders to
taxi drivers. May the new push produce more victories.