Class Action Suit Suggests Philadelphia's Civil Forfeiture Not So Civil
By Amy E. Feldman
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - What's civil forfeiture? It's a set of laws that have been called an assault on your property rights.
A class action lawsuit was filed this month against the City of Philadelphia over its use of civil forfeiture, which are laws that allow law enforcement to take property that's more likely than not connected to specific crimes like drug distribution.
But unlike criminal forfeiture, the property owner doesn't even have to be accused of a crime. Instead, the property itself must be connected to the activity so, for example, cases involving people selling drugs outside a home have led to forfeiture of the property even if the owner was never accused of a crime.
The lawsuit claims that the police and district attorney who are in charge of bringing claims are the ones who benefit once a property is taken because, under many of these laws, law enforcement agencies get to keep 90 percent of the profits from assets they forfeit.
For its part, Philadelphia says that the process is a tool to clean up known drug dens and make neighborhoods safer. But with over a thousand properties seized in the last ten years in Philadelphia alone, the lawsuit claims that this process is a machine which takes property of innocent people without due process of law, and counties in every state in the country will watch the outcome.
