“Funding priorities like new vehicles, bullet-proof vests, opioid overdose reversal kits, and better training are all paid for by asset forfeitures. In departments across this country, funds that were once used to take lives are now being used to save lives and it removes the inner instrumentalities of crimes such as illegal firearms, ammunition, explosives, and property associated with child pornography from criminals, preventing them from being able to use these tools to further their criminal acts.”
There are two giant flaws in this. While claiming it is about “illegal firearms,ammunition, explosives, and property associated with child pornography” it is fact that no one has to be convicted of a crime in order for the assets to be seized, on the “civil” not criminal MERE CLAIM that the assets are the product of or used in the commission of a crime, or crimes. Guilt, not innocence is ASSUMED, without trial when the assets are seized. Then, even when no criminal trial ever convicts the person from whom the assets are seized - it happens often enough every year, the person has to sue to proclaim they are innocent - again showing the law is about “guilty until proven innocent”.
The second thing is the whole asset forfeiture agenda becomes an institutional fundraising enterprise that takes on its own importance and priority, often enough putting that priority over and above true justice.
We need asset forfeiture to be restricted to existing proof, in a trial of guilt and guilt demonstrating the acquisition or use of assets to be seized. An additional law can be passed to provide a civil court process ahead of the criminal trial, to demonstrate to a judge the need to have assets “closed off” from a suspect, until the criminal trial is over. That can include a court order placing assets in a non-government held escrow account, by court order, requiring a subsequent court order to have the first order lifted, or placed in the governments hands.
Altogether “due process” and innocent until proven guilty should prevail.
That’s reasonable.