Excerpts
SUMMARY: Property seizure is a profitable practice for local law enforcement agencies, long used to deprive mobsters and drug kingpins. But the police can also take personal goods away from citizens who haven't been proven guilty of a crime. Ray Suarez talks to Sarah Stillman who investigated civil forfeiture for The New Yorker.
SARAH STILLMAN, The New Yorker: Well, most people are familiar with this idea of criminal forfeiture.
And that's a widely supported notion that, if you're profiting from crime -- let's say you're a big drug kingpin -- and you have bought your Malibu mansion and your Gulfstream jet with the proceeds of your crime, then those things will be taken away from you. And that make a lot of sense again to people.
But many folks are unfamiliar with the idea of civil forfeiture, which is actually a case brought against, directly against a piece a property, where you don't need to be proven guilty of a crime for your goods to be taken away. And many of the conventional protections that you have under the criminal process are not afforded to you in a civil forfeiture case.
RAY SUAREZ: So, there's no trial. There's no requirement to provide evidence to prove the state's suspicion. They just take your stuff.
SARAH STILLMAN: Exactly.
And you don't even have the right to a lawyer. So, conventionally, if you're facing the loss of your home or the loss of your car or cash, normally, at the very least, you would have someone who is able to represent you in these claims.
In places like Washington, D.C., you have to even pay $2,500 simply for the right to contest the case. And you're, again, not entitled to representation when you do that. So it can be a very costly process and also just a very confusing, arduous process to figure out, how do you contest?
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