The Volokh Conspiracy

That’s the title of a new article by Trevor Burrus (Cato) and me, forthcoming in a symposium issue on drug policy, from the Albany Government Law Review. The symposium title is “Overdose: The Failure of the US Drug War and Attempts at Legalization.” Here is an excerpt from the introduction:

In this Article we discuss the synergistic relationship between the “wars” on drugs, guns, alcohol, sex, and gambling and how that relationship has helped illegitimately increase the power of the federal government over the past century. The Constitution never granted Congress the general “police power” to legislate on health, safety, welfare, and morals; the police power was reserved to the States. Yet over the last century, federal laws against guns, alcohol, gambling, and some types of sex, have encroached on the police powers traditionally reserved to the states. Congress’s infringement of the States’ powers over the “health, safety, welfare, and morals”6 of their citizens occurred slowly, with only intermittent resistance from the courts. In no small part due to this synergistic relationship, today we have a federal government that has become unmoored from its constitutional boundaries and legislates recklessly over the health, safety, welfare, and morals of American citizens.

In part I we discuss how the Taxing Clause was the original conduit for congressional overreach. In part II we analyze the Interstate Commerce Clause’s role in augmenting government power. Part III examines how that overreach has affected citizens’ property rights, and Part IV looks at how civil liberties, particularly Fourth Amendment protections, have been negatively affected by the federal government’s synergistic wars against sex, drugs, gambling, and guns.

This 20-page article is certainly not a comprehensive survey of the synergistic effects of the constitutional damage caused by the federal wars on drugs, guns, alcohol, sex, and gambling. It is a start at a topic that is worthy of much additional scholarly exploration.

The Boston Herald reports that controversial US Attorney Carmen Ortiz may be planning to appeal her trial court defeat in United States v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, the highly abusive asset forfeiture case I blogged about on Friday:

U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz said her office is weighing an appeal against a Tewksbury motel owner who criticized her for prosecutorial bullying last week after he won his battle in the feds’ three-year bid to seize his business, citing drug busts on the property.

“This case was strictly a law-enforcement effort to crack down on what was seen as a pattern of using the motel to further the commission of drug crimes for nearly three decades,” Ortiz said in a statement. “We are weighing our options with respect to appeal.”

Russ Caswell, owner of Motel Caswell, told the Herald he thought the case was “bullying by the government” and felt vindicated when a judge sided with him after his court victory last week.

“It’s like they’ve got nothing better to do,” Caswell said after he heard prosecutors are considering an appeal.

To some extent, I actually hope Ortiz does appeal. Given the extreme facts of the case (which I discussed here and here), it’s likely that the First Circuit Court of Appeals will reach the same conclusion as the trial court did. And unlike a district court decision, a court of appeals decision is binding precedent that lower courts in that region of the country must follow. But I also feel for the property owners here, who have already endured a three-year legal battle over an asset forfeiture action that should never have gotten started in the first place. Even with excellent pro bono legal representation by the Institute for Justice, they have likely gone through a painful ordeal that should not be extended any longer.

Ortiz has already achieved notoriety as the prosecutor in the controversial federal case against the late internet activist Aaron Swartz. I’m not nearly expert enough in internet law to have a strong opinion about her conduct in that instance. But I do know enough to say that prolonging this asset forfeiture battle is unlikely to improve her reputation.

UPDATE: I should have noted in the original post that the Solicitor General has the ultimate authority to decide whether to appeal cases that the federal government loses in district court. So the decision will not be up to Ortiz alone. However, the US attorney in charge of the case generally has substantial input into the decision.

A federal district court in Massachusetts has ruled in favor of the property owners in United States v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, an important asset forfeiture case. This is the case where the federal government sought the forfeiture of a motel on the grounds that a few of the motel’s customers had bought or sold illegal drugs on the premises – even though there was no evidence that the owners knew about the sales or facilitated them in any way. I previously discussed the case in this post, and it was also the focus of a Washington Post column by George Will.

Magistrate Judge Judith Dein’s opinion emphasizes the unusually extreme facts of this case as a basis for ruling that the motel was not eligible for forfeiture:

After reviewing the scores of cases cited by the parties, I find this case to be notable in several critical respects, including (1) the Government has identified only a limited number of isolated qualifying drug-related incidents spread out over the course of more than a decade, none of which involve the Motel owner or employees; and (2) the witnesses unanimously confirmed that no efforts were undertaken to work with the Motel owner to try and reduce drug crimes at the Property prior to the institution of the forfeiture action, nor was any warning given as to the possibility of forfeiture prior to suit being filed. As a result, the instant case is easily distinguishable from other cases where the “draconian” result of forfeiture was found to be appropriate.

The decision is based on statutory grounds and does not address the constitutional issues raised by takings targeting innocent property owners. Indeed, Judge Dein reiterates the longstanding, but in my view dubious, doctrine that “it is not necessary that the forfeited property be owned by a culpable person.”

Although the case is a significant victory for property owners, it also highlights the difficult of combating asset forfeiture abuse. The motel owners won only after extensive litigation. And even then, they might not have succeeded but for the efforts of the Institute for Justice, the prominent libertarian public interest law firm specializing in property rights issues that represented them pro bono, and helped attract national attention to the case. And the case may not be over yet, since federal prosecutors could decide to appeal. Most owners of property targeted for asset forfeiture do not have the resources for a prolonged legal battle. Asset forfeiture abuse remains a serious problem in many states. The struggle over this issue will continue.

As the Boston Business Journal points out, the case is also notable as “a high-profile loss for U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz, whose office has been besieged by criticism in recent weeks over her handling of the prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz.” It will be interesting to see whether Ortiz decides to appeal this decision to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I have worked with the Institute for Justice on several other property rights cases, but had no involvement in this one.

UPDATE: I should emphasize that, whatever one thinks of Carmen Ortiz, the problem of asset forfeiture abuse is not limited to this one controversial prosecutor. The practice of targeting innocent property owners and then making it difficult or impossible for them to challenge the seizure of their assets is common in many states. The real tragedy here is that Ortiz’s actions were probably only modestly more egregious than what has become standard practice in many jurisdictions.

John Ross of Reason has a nice article summarizing the problem of asset forfeiture abuse, as exemplified by dubious practices in the nation’s capital:

Jerrie Brathwaite was not in her car when Washington, D.C. police seized it in January 2012. She had lent her 2000 Nissan Maxima to a friend, and that friend was pulled over, searched, and found to be in possession of drugs. A year later, Braithwaite—who has never been charged with a crime—still doesn’t have her car back, and no one from the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) will return her calls.

Brathwaite, 33, is knee-deep in the murky world of civil asset forfeiture, where confiscated cars, cash, and other property disappear into police coffers, and where legal recourse for owners is confusing, slow, and expensive. Under civil forfeiture, police can seize property from people who are never convicted—much less charged with—a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where the government must prove property was used in the commission of crime, civil forfeiture law presumes an owner’s guilt....

Brathwaite’s situation—and the MPD’s behavior—are not uncommon. Civil forfeiture is a national problem. Law enforcement agencies seize millions of dollars worth of property each year with little or no due process for owners. In all but six states property owners are considered guilty until proven innocent. State law typically allows law enforcement to keep most or all of the proceeds from forfeiture—an enormous incentive to police for profit.

I previously wrote about this problem here, here, and here. In 2009, the Supreme Court heard a case addressing the question of whether forfeiture policies that give owners little or no opportunity to challenge the seizure of their property violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which bans states from depriving people of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” That case was dismissed on procedural grounds. Hopefully, the justices will revisit the issue in the future. As a lower court judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an important opinion striking down a particularly egregious asset forfeiture regime on due process grounds. I hope the Supreme Court ultimately adopts a similar approach.

UPDATE: I have made minor changes to this post to eliminate some awkward wording.

Radley Balko has an interesting column noting the troubling implications of some of the arguments being made in the drug-sniffing dog cases currently before the Supreme Court. He points out that these dogs’ drug alerts are often unreliable because, in many cases, dogs seek to please their handlers rather than search out the truth. Thus, they often alert when they sense that the handler wants them to do so (e.g. – if he has a hunch). This leads to a very high rate of false positives in tests:

[T]he majority of the [Supreme Court] justices assumed that the nose of a dog is infallible — that an alert from a dog indicated the presence of whatever the dog was trained to find, and nothing else. An alert, then, was enough to establish probable cause for a more thorough search by law enforcement personnel.

That assumption was wrong at the time, and it has been repeatedly proven wrong since...
Consider another study conducted by Lisa Lit, a neurologist and former dog handler at the University of California-Davis. Lit brought 18 dog/handler teams currently operating in law enforcement agencies to an empty church. Each team conducted eight searches, each lasting about five minutes. If they were accurate, none of the dog/handler teams should have alerted in any of the searches. There were no drugs or explosives anywhere in the church.

But Lit had set some traps. The handlers were told that each search could have as many as three “target scents” — drugs for the drug dog teams, or explosives for the explosive dog teams. The handlers were told that in some cases hot packages were indicated by a piece of red paper. These red paper packages were designed to trick the handlers. Lit also set a trap for the dogs: Some of the packages contained unwrapped sausages.

The results were striking. The dogs falsely alerted in 123 of the 144 total searches. Because some dogs falsely alerted more than once in the same search, the total number of false alerts was 225. The dogs correctly completed the search without an alert just 21 times, for a success rate of 14.5 percent.

But here’s the more interesting part: The dogs were about twice as likely to falsely alert at the packages designed to trick their handlers than they were at the packages stuffed with sausages.

Why did so many fail? It wasn’t the dogs’ fault. A dog’s nose more than lives up to the hype. It is the finely tuned instrument you’ve always heard it to be. The problem is that for thousands of years, we’ve bred into dogs a more lovable trait: a constant, tail-wagging, cheek-licking desire to please us.

We’ve primarily bred dogs for protection and for companionship. The dogs that exhibited those qualities would get bred again, strengthening the traits from generation to generation. Over time, the dogs that were best at those two tasks were those that could read our body language, and react accordingly. This is why my dog barks when there’s a stranger at the door, but will curl up into a date’s lap within a few minutes of having met her. She’s picking up on my cues.

If a drug dog isn’t trained to account for this, it’s likely only confirming its handler’s biases and suspicions....

Balko also points out that police departments often have perverse incentives to use poorly trained dogs, because doing so makes it easier to get search warrants and seize property for asset forfeitures. I discussed the latter problem in this post. Finally, he notes that the conjunction of several individually plausible potential Supreme Court decisions could have very troubling effects in combination:

It might make sense to rule that a drug dog’s sniff is not a search under the Fourth Amendment, because a sniff is relatively unintrusive. There may be nothing unreasonable about ruling that a drug dog’s alert is enough to establish probable cause. After all, we all know that dogs have a finely honed sense of smell. And finally, it might make sense to rule that it is unreasonable to require prosecutors and police departments to provide a particular dog/handler team’s field history, because doing so would place an undue burden on law enforcement agencies.

Taken in isolation, you could make a good argument that these are all perfectly reasonable rulings. But put them together. By this time next year, we could be facing this terrifying reality: Police could take a dog/handler team into an apartment complex or to a row of townhouses and have them sniff dozens, even hundreds of residences. That team may have a history in which less than half the dog’s alerts lead to any actual recovery of narcotics. No matter. The police could then make note of all the doors at which the dog alerted, and all of those residences could look forward to middle-of-the-night visits from the local SWAT team.

Details here, from Americans for Forfeiture Reform. In short, BATFE becomes another federal agency which gets to seize large sums of cash, based on presumption that a large sum of cash must be related to an illegal transaction in controlled substances. And notwithstanding the fact that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is a Bureau whose job involves federal laws about alcohol, tobacco, firearms and explosives, not controlled substances.

Co-blogger Orin Kerr describes a planned effort by one local government to raise revenue by increasing asset forfeitures through the use of drug-sniffing dogs. Unfortunately, this is just one example of a growing trend of using asset forfeiture as a fundraising tool for law enforcement agencies. In this recent post, I rounded up many sources documenting the problem, including excellent articles by Radley Balko and George Will, and this report by the Institute for Justice. Asset forfeiture laws frequently victimize property owners who haven’t even been convicted of any crime, and in some states give them little or no opportunity to challenge the forfeiture of their possession, thereby flagrantly violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which denies government the power to take away property without “due process of law.” This column by Steven Greenhut is a good summary of the problem:

Few groups of “sinners” were singled out in biblical accounts more than “tax collectors,” who were not merely state agents collecting revenues that taxpayers rightfully owed to the government. They were the source of particular loathing because they were extortionists, who profited personally by shaking down as much money from citizens as possible...

The Gospel accounts provide an early lesson in the danger of marrying the profit motive with governmental power. The possibility for abuse is great. Yet throughout the United States, government agencies increasingly rely on “civil forfeiture” to bolster their strained budgets. The more assets these modern-day tax collectors seize, the more money they have for new equipment and other things....

If, for instance, your neighbor borrowed your green Buick and sold some marijuana to an undercover agent, the law enforcement agency can seize the car. The owner might not have done anything wrong, but the car was indeed used in the commission of a crime. Activists point to instances where the government has become more creative in seeking assets—homes, cars, bank accounts—based on minor violations of the ever-expanding criminal code... As the number of regulatory crimes grows, the cases in which the government can seize assets grows along with it....

There is something terribly disturbing about this “policing for profit” trend, especially in our current world where the number of laws keeps growing. We’ve all become accustomed to police increasing their ticket-writing to backfill their budgets, but asset forfeiture takes the profiteering to a new and disturbing level. Agencies know that it’s so costly for people to fight their forfeiture proceedings that many victims simply cede the property without a fight. That’s wrong.

The Supreme Court planned to address some of the constitutional issues raised by dubious asset forfeitures in the 2009 case of Alvarez v. Smith, but ended up dismissing the case on procedural grounds. As a lower court judge, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion curbing especially egregious asset forfeitures that violate the Due Process Clause. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will eventually follow her example on this issue.

In the meantime, awareness of asset forfeiture abuse is slowly rising. But reform efforts are hindered by the reality that most of the victims are relatively poor and lack political clout. In addition, law enforcement agencies and local governments are unwilling to part with this lucrative revenue source, especially in difficult economic times.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting that drug-sniffing police dogs are often highly inaccurate, because dogs want to please their human handlers and therefore may turn up a false positive because that’s the reaction they think the handler wants. As Radley Balko explains, this can lead to bogus asset forfeitures:

The consequences of misusing police dogs go well beyond unconstitutional searches. A drug dog’s alert can help establish a connection between a suspect’s property and drug activity, allowing police to seize the property for possible forfeiture. Even if the owner is never charged with a crime, the burden is on him to go to court to win back what was his, a process that often costs more than the property is worth. In a case I reported last year, for example, college student Anthony Smelley had $17,500 in cash that he’d won in an accident settlement seized when police in Indiana pulled him over and a drug dog alerted to Smelley’s car. It took Smelley more than a year to win the cash back in court, even though a subsequent hand search turned up no illegal substances.

The danger of a false positive induced by a dog’s desire to please is especially great when asset forfeiture is a possibility, because law enforcement officers often have a strong desire to maximize the amount of property they can seize for their agency’s benefit. Moreover, many of the dogs used for drug-sniffing are retrievers. And, as my fellow retriever owners know, retrievers are even more eager to please than most other dog breeds.

Asset forfeiture laws in many states allow the police to seize property that has supposedly been used to commit a crime, and then keep the proceeds for themselves. Often, these laws victimize people who have not been convicted of any crime, and indeed did not even know that their property might have been misused. They also often give the owner little or no opportunity to challenge the seizure, thereby flagrantly violating the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Needless to say, such perverse incentives lead to many abuses, as documented in a 2010 report by the Institute for Justice.

Two excellent recent articles by George Will and Radley Balko describe some particularly egregious examples.

Here is Will:

Russ Caswell, 68, is bewildered: “What country are we in?” He and his wife, Pat, are ensnared in a Kafkaesque nightmare unfolding in Orwellian language....

In the lawsuit titled United States of America v. 434 Main Street, Tewksbury, Massachusetts, the government is suing an inanimate object, the motel Caswell’s father built in 1955. The U.S. Department of Justice intends to seize it, sell it for perhaps $1.5 million and give up to 80 percent of that to the Tewksbury Police Department, whose budget is just $5.5 million. The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of, a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing” of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery....

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on drug-dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate — the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate — these 30 episodes involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the 125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days. Yet this is the government’s excuse for impoverishing the Caswells by seizing this property, which is their only significant source of income and all of their retirement security.

The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime. It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them to prove their innocence — to prove they did everything possible to prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms. What counts as possible remains vague. The Caswells voluntarily installed security cameras, they photocopy customers’ identifications and record their license plates, and they turn the information over to the police, who have never asked the Caswells to do more.

Balko describes an equally ridiculous case:

When the Brown County, Wis., Drug Task Force arrested her son Joel last February, Beverly Greer started piecing together his bail....

“The police specifically told us to bring cash,” Greer says. “Not a cashier’s check or a credit card. They said cash.”

So Greer and her family visited a series of ATMs, and on March 1, she brought the money to the jail, thinking she’d be taking Joel Greer home. But she left without her money, or her son.

Instead jail officials called in the same Drug Task Force that arrested Greer. A drug-sniffing dog inspected the Greers’ cash, and about a half-hour later, Beverly Greer said, a police officer told her the dog had alerted to the presence of narcotics on the bills — and that the police department would be confiscating the bail money.

“I told them the money had just come from the bank,” Beverly Greer says. “We had just taken it out. If the money had drugs on it, then they should go seize all the money at the bank, too. I just don’t understand how they could do that....”

It took four months for Beverly Greer to get her family’s money back, and then only after attorney Andy Williams agreed to take their case. “The family produced the ATM receipts proving that had recently withdrawn the money,” Williams says. “Beverly Greer had documentation for her disability check and her tax return. Even then, the police tried to keep their money....”

Civil asset forfeiture is based on the premise that a piece of property — a car, a pile of cash, a house — can be guilty of a crime. Laws vary from state to state, but generally, law enforcement officials can seize property if they can show any connection between the property and illegal activity. It is then up to the owner of the property to prove in court that he owns it or earned it legitimately. It doesn’t require a property owner to actually be convicted of a crime. In fact, most people who lose property to civil asset forfeiture are never charged. ...

Although Mrs. Greer was able to recover her money, authorities in Wisconsin and elsewhere continue to seize cash based on “alerts” by drug-sniffing dogs, that can be extremely misleading:

But even in the odd world of asset forfeiture, the seizure of bail money because of a drug-dog alert raises other concerns. In addition to increasing skepticism over the use of drug-sniffing dogs, studies have consistently shown that most U.S. currency contains traces of cocaine. In a 1994 ruling, for example, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals cited studies showing that 75 percent of U.S. currency in Los Angeles included traces of narcotics. In 2009, researchers at the University of Massachusetts analyzed 234 bills collected from 18 cities, and found that 90 percent contained traces of cocaine....

Stephen Downing, a retired narcotics cop who served as assistant police chief in Los Angeles, says it isn’t surprising that a drug dog would alert to a pile of cash, since it usually has traces of drugs.

“I’d call these cases direct theft. They’re hijackings,” says Downing, who is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an organization of former police and prosecutors who advocate ending the drug war.

Downing says he recently consulted a medical marijuana activist in California who was told to bring his bail money in cash, despite the fact that state law allows payment with a cashier’s check, a registered check or a credit card. “It makes me wonder if this seizing of bail is a new idea getting shopped around in law enforcement circles.”

While the details of these abuses vary, the underlying problem is the same: an asset forfeiture system that allows law enforcement agencies to seize the property of the innocent and then keep the loot for themselves. This predictably leads to a situation where many take the property first and only ask questions later – if at all. As Balko points out, low-income property owners are particularly likely to be victimized, because they often lack the funds to hire a lawyer to contest the seizure and state law often does not pay for a public defender in these cases.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: I have done pro bono work on other cases for the Institute for Justice, which is representing the property owner in the Tewksbury case.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before noticing Jonathan Adler’s earlier post on the same subject. I am leaving this post up because it goes into much more detail. Also, I disagree with Jonathan’s statement that this sort of abuse is “constitutional.” The Supreme Court ruled that it was in Bennis v. Michigan. But I think the dissenters in that case (a cross-ideological coalition of Justices Kennedy and Stevens) got it right.

Moreover, Bennis held merely that the seizure of innocent owners’ property does not automatically violate the Due Process Clause. It did not rule on the Due Process Clause issues that arise when the authorities seize the property with little or no evidence that it actually was used in a crime, or when they fail to give the owner a meaningful and prompt opportunity to challenge the seizure in court. In a 2009 case, the Supreme Court planned to address the latter issue, but ended up dismissing the case as moot.

UPDATE #2: In an update to his post, Jonathan clarifies that he too is sympathetic to many of the arguments made by the Bennis dissenters. For my part, I agree with him that not every morally objectionable forfeiture practice is necessarily unconstitutional.

Radley Balko reports on fairly severe asset forfeiture abuse in Wisconsin. In short, after a woman’s son was arrested, the police told her she had to pay for his bail in cash (which was untrue). Then, when she showed up with the money, most of which she had just withdrawn from ATMs, the police seized the money under the state’s asset forfeiture law because a drug-sniffing dog detected traces of drugs on the money. Even with the help of an attorney, it took four months for the woman to get her money back. It’s bad enough that this sort of abuse is constitutional. It’s even worse that Wisconsin law enforcement would act this way.

UPDATE: Speaking of asset forfeiture abuse, George Will had a column last week on another disturbing case.

SECOND UPDATE: Given Ilya’s post above, I thought I’d add a slight clarification. When I wrote that asset forfeiture is “constitutional” as currently practiced, I meant this as shorthand for “constitutional under existing Supreme Court doctrine.” Like Ilya, I am quite sympathetic to the dissenters in Bennis v. Michigan, and suspect much civil asset forfeiture would transgress a proper application of the due process clause, though I have not delved sufficiently deeply into this area to have a more fully-formed view on the limits the due process clause places on asset forfeiture. That many current practices are outrageous does not necessarily mean that they are unconstitutional.

Scott Johnson (PowerLine) reports on this very interesting case (United States v. $35,131.00 in United States Currency (S.D. Tex. Apr. 2, 2012)). I’m not sure whether the opinion is legally sound — this is far from my area of expertise — but I thought I’d pass it along, and I’d love to hear what others who know this area of the law have to say:

1. Introduction.

At the airport, federal officers confiscated $35,131 from a family flying to Ethiopia. They said that the couple intentionally attempted to evade the reporting requirements for taking money outside of the United States. The citizens clearly had no intention to violate the rules, and the government must return their money and pay for their attorney’s fees and costs of court.

Continue reading ‘“Opinion on Void Seizure”’ »

Radley Balko has an interesting piece at Huffington Post on the ways in which the War on Drugs creates perverse incentives for police departments:

Arresting people for assaults, beatings and robberies doesn’t bring money back to police departments, but drug cases do in a couple of ways. First, police departments across the country compete for a pool of federal anti-drug grants. The more arrests and drug seizures a department can claim, the stronger its application for those grants.

“The availability of huge federal anti-drug grants incentivizes departments to pay for SWAT team armor and weapons, and leads our police officers to abandon real crime victims in our communities in favor of ratcheting up their drug arrest stats,” said former Los Angeles Deputy Chief of Police Stephen Downing. Downing is now a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an advocacy group of cops and prosecutors who are calling for an end to the drug war.

“When our cops are focused on executing large-scale, constitutionally questionable raids at the slightest hint that a small-time pot dealer is at work, real police work preventing and investigating crimes like robberies and rapes falls by the wayside,” Downing said.

And this problem is on the rise all over the country. Last year, police in New York City arrested around 50,000 people for marijuana possession. Pot has been decriminalized in New York since 1977, but displaying the drug in public is still a crime. So police officers stop people who look “suspicious,” frisk them, ask them to empty their pockets, then arrest them if they pull out a joint or a small amount of marijuana. They’re tricked into breaking the law. According to a report from Queens College sociologist Harry Levine, there were 33,775 such arrests from 1981 to 1995. Between 1996 and 2010 there were 536,322.

Several NYPD officers have alleged that in some precincts, police officers are asked to meet quotas for drug arrests. Former NYPD narcotics detective Stephen Anderson recently testified in court that it’s common for cops in the department to plant drugs on innocent people to meet those quotas — a practice for which Anderson himself was then on trial.

At the same time, there’s increasing evidence that the NYPD is paying less attention to violent crime. In an explosive Village Voice series last year, current and former NYPD officers told the publication that supervising officers encouraged them to either downgrade or not even bother to file reports for assault, robbery and even sexual assault.

Even when police officials don’t consciously prioritize drug crimes ahead of violent crimes, the vast expenditure of law enforcement resources on the former probably reduces the amount of police effort that can be devoted to the latter.

Later in the article, Balko notes that the War on Drugs also incentivizes police departments to shift resources away from violent crime because drug busts allow them to earn extra money through asset forfeiture, while solving violent crime usually does not:

The most perverse policy may be asset forfeiture. Under civil asset forfeiture, police can seize property from people merely suspected of drug crimes. So long as police can show even the slightest link of drug activity to a car, some cash, or even a home, they can seize it. In the majority of cases, most or all of the seized cash goes back to the police department. In some cases, the department has taken possession of cars as well, but generally non-cash property is auctioned off, with the proceeds then going back to the department. An innocent person who has property seized must go to court and prove his property was earned legitimately, even if he was never charged with a crime. The process of going to court can often be more expensive than the value of the property itself.

Asset forfeiture not only encourages police agencies to use resources and manpower on drug crimes at the expense of violent crimes, it also provides an incentive for police agencies to actually wait until drugs are on the streets before making a bust.

I wrote about the ways in asset forfeiture threaten constitutional property rights here.

The Institute for Justice, a prominent libertarian public interest law firm, has an important new report detailing the many abuses of property rights in the asset forfeiture system. Here are a few of the key findings:

In most states and under federal law, law enforcement can keep some or all of the proceeds from civil forfeitures. This incentive has led to concern that civil forfeiture encourages policing for profit, as agencies pursue forfeitures to boost their budgets at the expense of other policing priorities. These concerns are exacerbated by legal procedures that make civil forfeiture relatively easy for the government and hard for property owners to fight. For example, once law enforcement seizes property, the government must prove it was involved in criminal activity to forfeit or permanently keep it. But in nearly all states and at the federal level, the legal standard of proof the government must meet for civil forfeiture is lower than the strict standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt” required for criminal convictions.....

[I]n most places, owners bear the burden of establishing their innocence. In other words, with civil forfeiture, property owners are effectively guilty until proven innocent....

Finally, federal civil forfeiture laws encourage abuse by providing a loophole to law enforcement in states with good laws for property owners: “equitable sharing.” With equitable sharing, state law enforcement can turn over seized assets to the federal government, or they may seize them jointly with federal officers. The property is then subject to federal civil forfeiture law—not state law. Federal law provides as much as 80 percent of the proceeds to state law enforcement and stacks the deck against property owners. Thus, the equitable sharing loophole provides a way for state and local law enforcement to profit from forfeitures that they may not be able to under state law.

The authors also provide the first comprehensive survey of state asset forfeiture laws, giving each a “grade” on the A to F scale. They find that most of them provide little if any protection for innocent property owners:

Only three states—Maine, North Dakota and Vermont—receive a combined grade of B or higher. The other 47 states all receive Cs or Ds.

• Most state civil forfeiture laws provide little protection to property owners. Six states receive an F and 29 states receive
a D for their laws alone. Lax federal laws earn the federal government a law grade of D-.

• Eight states receive a B or higher for their laws: Indiana, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio and Vermont. But extensive use of equitable sharing pulls down the final grades of five of those states: Indiana (C+), Maryland (C+),
Missouri (C+), North Carolina (C+) and Ohio (C-).

• The lowest-graded states overall, combining both poor laws and aggressive use of equitable sharing, are Georgia,
Michigan, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia.

I have previously criticized the asset forfeiture system here, here, and here, pointing out how it often violates constitutional property rights under the Due Process Clause. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to curb some of the more extreme violations of constitutional rights in Alvarez v. Smith, a case it ended up dismissing on procedural grounds.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST WATCH: As I have noted in previous posts involving IJ, I have written several pro bono amicus briefs for them in the past and was an IJ summer clerk during the summer of 1998, after my first year in law school.