Older brothers sometimes invent dubious excuses to avoid being
punished for their bad behavior. They’ll claim, for example,
that it was the baseball bat—not they—that hit their little
brother. Most parents instinctively reject this idea that
inanimate objects can be guilty of crimes, but that is precisely
what drives the law enforcement practice known as asset
forfeiture. Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois has observed that
in a recent year, federal and state police in Michigan alone
used asset forfeiture laws over 9,000 times to confiscate more
than 14 million dollars’ worth of private property from Michigan
citizens. Because it’s the property itself that is presumed to
be guilty, none of these owners is granted the rights normally
available to accused persons—in fact, most are never even
charged with any crime. Though forfeiture laws were originally
intended to confiscate the profits of drug kingpins, Congressman
John Conyers of Detroit notes that it’s ordinary, law-abiding
citizens who are increasingly thr