Welcome to the new Forfeiture
Report. I thought long and hard after my hiatus from the previous iteration of
this site and decided that a relaunch was in order. Why? Well, the answer is
simple; the blog was a mess. It needed some trimming, some tightening, and a
new focus. I’ve washed the previous posts from the site and I will sort through
them to salvage what I can, but from here on out I will be focused on new
content.
The new Forfeiture Report will be
research focused, with a smattering of news commentary and legal analysis. Back
in 2009, when my interest in drug policy led me down the trail of civil asset
forfeiture, one of the first setbacks I ran in to was the lack of readily available data and research. My searches through JSTOR, Academic Search Premier,
Westlaw, and Lexis-Nexis yielded disappointing results. There were many notable
scholarly articles on the legal processes and constitutional issues, but only a
couple of empirical studies.
In terms of visible public
organizations, the Institute for Justice, who published the excellent Policing for Profit when I well in to the first draft of my thesis, appears to be the
only national group conducting research on asset forfeiture. There are smaller
groups, such as Forfeiture Endangers American Rights (FEAR) and my former
employer Americans for Forfeiture Reform (AFR), who do excellent work on the issue
but are not actively pursuing a research agenda. The Cato Institute, who
published the late Henry Hyde’s seminal treatise Forfeiting Our Property Rights, likewise does an
excellent job publicizing the problems of forfeiture, but does not seem to be
working on any kind of data projects or empirical studies.
The focus of this site will be on
combing through the available data and analyzing it. There is a proverbial
mountain of data available publicly from the federal Department of Justice
and several state agencies, such as California’s Attorney General, that sits
ignored and unaddressed. In the coming weeks and months I will be using DOJ
data to create Equitable Sharing Profiles of each of the 50 states. Commentary on
current forfeiture related news will be mixed in, as well as discussion of the
many Supreme Court decisions and the legal reasoning behind them that has led
us to this point.
The intent here is to go beyond activist
horror stories of abuse and contribute something more to the criminal justice
research community. My ultimate goal is to create a searchable database that
can be used by activists and academics, as well as ordinary citizens and law
makers, who find themselves as I did 4 years ago, wandering through the dark in
search of information. The information is out there just waiting to be turned
in to something consumable. If not me, then who?
