Appeals Court Says Michigan County’s Vehicle Forfeiture Program Is Unconstitutional

Legal Issues

from the who's-the-real-criminal-here dept
Mon, Sep 18th 2023 03:48pm - Tim Cushing

Wayne County, Michigan cops and prosecutors love seizing property. According to law enforcement, seizing cash and cars from people (while often not charging them with crimes) is the best way to break up criminal organizations and disrupt the illegal drug market.

What’s left unexplained is how Wayne County’s forfeiture program does anything more than make poor people poorer.

Jarrett Skorup of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, who co-authored a recent report on civil forfeiture, said the data shows nearly all of those Wayne County seizures involved vehicles valued at less than $1,000. He said it’s likely that these forfeitures disproportionately affected low-income individuals, who are less able to afford an attorney or navigate the legal system to reclaim their property.

When I think “powerful/dangerous criminal,” I usually don’t associate them with vehicles featured in Craigslist ads suspiciously short on photos or vehicle condition descriptions. Seizing shitboxes from folks doesn’t do anything but add incrementally to the pool of purloined property prosecutors and cops are allowed to profit directly from.

That practice got Wayne County sued in 2020. Two plaintiffs, whose vehicles were taken due to alleged criminal acts of others (although criminal charges were never filed in either case), kicked off an expected class action challenging the county’s forfeiture program — both the way seizures were performed, as well as county’s unwillingness to engage with car owners seeking the return on their property.

That cycle of abuse also prompted asset forfeiture reforms in the state. (These have since been rolled back.) None other than Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy was the first to protest the proposal of making forfeiture dependent on criminal convictions, offering up this inadvertently hilarious criticism of the proposed reforms:

”Since a conviction is now required, it will make it extremely difficult to prosecute high level drug dealers,” Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said via email.

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