When a court case is named, the prosecution or plaintiff is named first and the defense is named second.
For example, when William Marbury brought suit against James Madison for delaying in delivering Marbury’s commission as a Justice of the Peace, the case was titled Marbury v. Madison. When Fred Korematsu brought suit against the U.S. government for falsely imprisoning him and thousands of other Japanese Americans during WWII it was titled, Korematsu v. the United States of America.
And when the U.S. government brought suit against approximately 64,695 pounds of shark fins for being the product of an illegal shark finning operation, the case was called "United States of America v. approximately 64,695 pounds of shark fins.”
Read that last one again. It’s not the punchline to an unfunny multiplication joke, nor the title of the next Epic Rap Battles of History video. Rather, it is the actual name of a real court case heard by the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. If you think it’s odd that someone would bring a suit against an inanimate object, you’re not the only one.
The shark fins case is but one of many examples of something called civil (or asset) forfeiture. The idea behind these cases is that police departments can seize illegal or illegally obtained goods and use the revenue generated from the sale of those goods to buy new equipment for the police department. Most civil forfeiture cases are drug related, where police seize drugs, guns or money and convert those products into funds for their department.
The key difference between civil forfeiture and “traditional” seizure of goods during an investigation is that, in order for police to keep the car that Johnny Drugdealer bought with drug money they have to put Johnny on trial and convict him of doing so.
In a civil forfeiture case the police can put the car itself on trial for being the proceeds of criminal activity. This is important because the car doesn’t have the same constitutional rights Johnny does or really any at all. Under civil forfeiture laws, Johnny can have his car taken away from him and never get it back without ever being charged with a crime.
I wish these kinds of examples were only theoretical. Two years ago, the American Civil Liberties Union settled a class action suit in Texas in which a total of $3 million was seized when “police officers routinely pulled over motorists in the vicinity of Tenaha without any legal justification, asked if they were carrying cash and, if they were, ordered them to sign over the cash to the city or face charges of money laundering or other serious crimes. Almost all of the stops involved Black and Latino drivers. None of the plaintiffs in the case were ever arrested or charged with a crime.”
The Institute for Justice rates South Carolina among the worst in the United States when it comes to civil forfeiture, in part because the legal threshold for forfeiture in our state is “probable cause," the same as used for a search warrant.
It’s little wonder then that, in 2003 (the latest year for which data has been released. I wonder what incentive police could have for taking so long to release the data?) alone, more than $4 million in assets were seized by departments throughout South Carolina.
Civil forfeiture is a tremendous violation of our Fourth Amendment privacy rights, private property rights and common sense. A shark fin cannot commit a crime.
Last week in Virginia, a bill was introduced that would reform civil forfeiture laws, and we should write our South Carolina legislators to do the same (before we lose the ability to do so after the United States of America v. approximately all of the pens and papers in South Carolina).