The Drug Enforcement Administration
takes billions of dollars in cash from people who are never charged
with criminal activity, according to a report issued Wednesday by the
Justice Department’s Inspector General.
Since
2007, the report found, the DEA has seized more than $4 billion in cash
from people suspected of involvement with the drug trade. But 81
percent of those seizures, totaling $3.2 billion, were conducted
administratively, meaning no civil or criminal charges were brought
against the owners of the cash and no judicial review of the seizures
ever occurred.
That total does not include the dollar value of other seized assets, like cars, homes, electronics and clothing.
These
seizures are all legal under the controversial practice of civil asset
forfeiture, which allows authorities to take cash, contraband and
property from people suspected of crime. But the practice does not
require authorities to obtain a criminal conviction, and it allows
departments to keep seized cash and property for themselves unless
individuals successfully challenge the forfeiture in court. Critics
across the political spectrum say this creates a perverse profit motive,
incentivizing police to seize goods not for the purpose of fighting
crime, but for padding department budgets.
Law
enforcement groups say the practice is a valuable tool for fighting
criminal organizations, allowing them to seize drug profits and other
ill-gotten goods. But the Inspector General’s report “raises serious
concerns that maybe real purpose here is not to fight crime, but to
seize and forfeit property,” said Darpana Sheth, senior attorney of the
Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law form that has fought for
forfeiture reform.
The
Inspector General found that the Department of Justice “does not
collect or evaluate the data necessary to know whether its seizures and
forfeitures are effective, or the extent to which seizures present
potential risks to civil liberties.”
In
the absence of this information, the report examined 100 DEA cash
seizures that occurred “without a court-issued warrant and without the
presence of narcotics, the latter of which would provide strong evidence
of related criminal behavior.”
Fewer
than half of those seizures were related to a new or ongoing criminal
investigation, or led to an arrest or prosecution, the Inspector General
found.
“When
seizure and administrative forfeitures do not ultimately advance an
investigation or prosecution,” the report concludes, “law enforcement
creates the appearance, and risks the reality, that it is more
interested in seizing and forfeiting cash than advancing an
investigation or prosecution.”
The
scope of asset forfeiture is staggering. Since 2007 the Department of
Justice’s Asset Forfeiture Fund, which collects proceeds from seized
cash and other property, has ballooned to $28 billion. In 2014 alone
authorities seized $5 billion in cash and property from people — greater
than the value of all documented losses to burglary that year.
In
most of the seizures examined by the Inspector General, DEA officers
initiated encounters with people based on whether they met certain
criteria, like “traveling to or from a known source city for drug
trafficking, purchasing a ticket within 24 hours of travel, purchasing a
ticket for a long flight with an immediate return, purchasing a one-way
ticket, and traveling without checked luggage.”
Some
of the encounters were based on tips from confidential sources working
in the travel industry, a number of whom have received large sums of
money in exchange for their cooperation. In one case, officers targeted
an individual for questioning on a tip from a travel industry informant
that the individual had paid for a plane ticket with a pre-paid debit
card and cash.
Most
individuals who have cash or property seized by law enforcement do not
dispute the seizure. There’s no right to an attorney in forfeiture
proceedings, meaning defendants must foot the bill for a lawyer
themselves. In many cases, forfeiture amounts are so small that they’re
not worth fighting in court.
Forfeiture
cases are also legally complex and difficult for individuals to win.
Forfeiture cases are brought against the property, rather than the
individual, leading to Kafkaesque case titles like United States v.
$8,850 in U.S. Currency and United States of America v. One Men’s Rolex
Pearl Master Watch.
While
criminal proceedings assume the defendant’s innocence, forfeiture
proceedings start from the presumption of guilt. That means that
individuals who fight forfeiture must prove their innocence in court.
For
these reasons, many defendants don’t bother disputing forfeitures. The
Inspector General’s report, however, did find that those who do contest
forfeitures often get at least a portion of their cash returned. Only
one-fifth of people who had their cash seized by the DEA disputed the
seizures in court. But among those who challenged the seizure, nearly 40
percent ended up getting all or some of their cash returned, suggesting
that the DEA’s forfeiture net ensnares many individuals not involved in
wrongdoing.
In
a written response to the Inspector General, the Department of Justice
said it had “significant concerns” with the report, noting that global
criminal enterprises launder trillions of dollars annually and calling
asset forfeiture “a critical tool to fight the current heroin and opioid
epidemic that is raging in the United States.”
It
also took issue with the Inspector General’s analysis of the 100 DEA
cash seizures it examined, saying more of them were connected with
criminal activity than the report suggested.
The Inspector General stood by the report and dismissed the Department’s concerns as “assumptions and speculation.” The Drug Enforcement Administration did not respond to a request for comment.
“Nobody
in America should lose their property without being convicted of a
crime,” said the Institute for Justice’s Sheth. “If our goal is to curb
crime, we should simply abolish civil forfeiture” and only forfeit
property after a criminal conviction is obtained, she added.
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