Algernon D'Ammassa: New Mexico's forfeiture act is a bold achievement

A good bill has slipped through the gridlock of partisan dysfunction in the Roundhouse. Perhaps we ought to have it bronzed.

Now the Forfeiture Act needs public support. As of this writing, Governor Martinez has been non-committal about signing the bill. Here is why it deserves to become law.

The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution provides, in seemingly straightforward language, that "no person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

Yet it has been a common practice for law enforcement to seize property even without a criminal conviction. The practice became a prominent weapon during the Reagan era and the "war on drugs," a way to take money away from drug lords and use it to fund law enforcement. New York City, under the authoritarian mayor Rudy Giuliani, later introduced its use against drunk drivers. Cities claim forfeiture as a deterrent, but revenue is clearly a major attraction.

Revenue certainly seemed uppermost in the mind of Las Cruces's former city attorney, Harry "Pete" Connelly, when he was videotaped at a law enforcement conference last September describing a well-written forfeiture complaint as a "masterpiece of deception" and describing police officers' excitement when pulling over a DWI suspect in a luxury car. Connelly tacitly acknowledged the class nature of forfeiture by admitting most of the cars seized under civil forfeiture were older cars that weren't as valuable.

The excesses of forfeiture are frightening. In Connelly's infamous lecture, he described a case in Philadelphia where a couple had their home seized because their son was involved in a $40 drug transaction on their porch. The city grabbed $4 million from 8,000 forfeiture cases in the year 2010 alone.

Criminal and civil forfeitures are different things. Criminal forfeiture follows a criminal conviction, whereas civil forfeiture, a concept created by statute, does not require a conviction or even necessarily a criminal charge against the property owner. It circumvents the Constitution in part by supposing that the property itself has broken the law, and may be seized regardless of whether the human being owning the property is charged with anything.

It makes sense that reforming forfeiture laws in New Mexico would pass our divided Legislature. It is a rare opportunity to correct injustices that matter to both the right and the left. On the right, the main concern has to do with property rights, and the power of government to take your stuff arbitrarily. Forbes contributor George Leef went as far as to argue that the plunder of forfeiture proves that "the state is our enemy." Take that, authoritarian wing of the Republican Party. On the left, forfeiture is also a matter of human rights and social inequality, as forfeiture falls hardest on the poor and non-white.

Gramercy! How often do we see the ACLU and the Rio Grande Foundation working together?

The Forfeiture Act effectively eliminates civil forfeiture, and enacts measures for proper accounting and transparency regarding criminal forfeitures. Moreover, the proceeds from seized assets would go to the general fund, not the agencies' own budgets, thus eliminating the profit motive from the agencies' priorities.

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Algernon D'Ammassa: New Mexico's forfeiture act is a bold achievement