The Comprehensive Forfeiture Act fixed all of these problems. The new bill was introduced by Senator Joe Biden in 1983 and it was signed into law the next year. With this law, federal agents had nearly unlimited powers to seize assets from private citizens. Now the government only needed to find a way to let local and state police join the party.This came with the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act. In addition to a slew of new powers for prosecutors, the burden of proof for asset seizure was lowered once again (agents had to only believe that what they were seizing was equal in value to money believed to have been purchased from drug sales). More significantly, the bill started the “equitable sharing” program that allowed local and state law enforcement to retain up to 80 percent of the assets seized.
The use of civil asset forfeiture has proliferated in the last few decades at local, state, and federal levels. Combined, these jurisdictions forfeited a total value of 68.8 billion dollars from 2000 to 2020. [8] In 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice, Department of the Treasury, forty-two states, and the District of Columbia together engaged in forfeiture valued over three billion dollars in the span of only one year. [9] Ideally, civil asset forfeiture dismantles criminal schemes while adhering to constitutional principles and funding victim compensation or community investment. In reality, however, the practice is at most a means to an end for the U.S. justice system. The absence of strong regulation in the legal landscape has allowed civil asset forfeiture to circumvent federalism, drive for-profit policing, and violate due process principles for property owners. As the use of civil asset forfeiture expands, future reform must assess its applicability, effectiveness, and relevance in the presence of viable alternatives, limiting asset forfeiture to criminal and administrative means.
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