On Tuesday night's Daily Show, correspondent Jordan Klepper explored a legal concept called "civil forfeiture," with some assistance from a few apparent victims of this form of legal highway quasi-robbery, an ACLU critic of the practice, NYPD cop Roy Richter, and some well-timed Law & Order chimes.
Richter explained that in a civil forfeiture action, police can seize cash and other assets from drivers if they suspect those assets are proceeds of a crime. The people whose cash the cops seized can get their money back, but they have to go to court and prove it was wrongly seized first. "So property is guilty until proven innocent?" Klepper asks Richter, and the answer is yes, kind of.
Vanita Gupta of the ACLU explained that it's often cheaper for innocent drivers to let the cops keep the money than to hire a lawyer to prove their innocence — and that both local and federal law enforcement agencies are counting on this stream of sketchy revenue to fund their departments. For the alleged victims of forfeiture abuse that Klepper interviews, this all feels like highway robbery, except that the robbers are the cops. And that seems a pretty plausible interpretation. --Peter Weber
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
ABC News to pay $15M in Trump defamation suitSpeed Read The lawsuit stemmed from George Stephanopoulos' on-air assertion that Trump was found liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll
-
Judge blocks Louisiana 10 Commandments lawSpeed Read U.S. District Judge John deGravelles ruled that a law ordering schools to display the Ten Commandments in classrooms was unconstitutional
-
ATF finalizes rule to close 'gun show loophole'Speed Read Biden moves to expand background checks for gun buyers
-
Hong Kong passes tough new security lawSpeed Read It will allow the government to further suppress all forms of dissent
-
France enshrines abortion rights in constitutionspeed read It became the first country to make abortion a constitutional right
-
Texas executes man despite contested evidenceSpeed Read Texas rejected calls for a rehearing of Ivan Cantu's case amid recanted testimony and allegations of suppressed exculpatory evidence
-
Supreme Court wary of state social media regulationsSpeed Read A majority of justices appeared skeptical that Texas and Florida were lawfully protecting the free speech rights of users
-
Greece legalizes same-sex marriageSpeed Read Greece becomes the first Orthodox Christian country to enshrine marriage equality in law
