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EDITORIAL: Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ new unit designed to monitor forfeiture abuses doesn’t go far enough

While critics of civil forfeiture have yet to see serious reform emerge from Congress, at least they can take some solace in the fact that many proponents of the controversial tool are now acknowledging its many inherent problems.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he is setting up a team inside the Justice Department to oversee the policy, which allows police to seize cash, homes and other valuables from people who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, criminal activity.

Mr. Sessions has long cultivated a “tough on crime” persona as good for his political survival in his home state of Alabama. One of his first moves as the nation’s top law enforcement officer was to reinstate a policy that allows local law enforcement officials to skirt tougher state forfeiture laws by piggybacking on more lax federal statutes. The move was greeted with disappointment from across the political spectrum.

Rep. Darryl Issa, a California Republican who has been a longtime opponent of the practice, called the move “disappointing.” The ACLU dubbed it “outrageous.”

Civil forfeiture is an affront to both due process and private property rights. Nobody should be deprived of their belongings based on the mere suspicion of wrongdoing. Yet choosing to fight is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, leading many innocent owners to accept their fate. Meanwhile, police agencies for three decades have been ramping up their use of forfeiture because they often get to keep a significant portion of the money generated by seized assets.

Horror stories abound, even in Nevada. In 2015, a federal judge ordered authorities to return $167,000 taken from a man after he was pulled over on Interstate 80 near Elko for a traffic violation. He was never charged with a crime or even ticketed. The only unusual aspect of the case was that the man got his money back.

A 2014 Washington Post investigation found that since 2001, “state and local police have seized almost $2.5 billion from motorists and others with search warrants or indictments. Police routinely stopped drivers for minor traffic violations, pushed them to agree to searches without warrants and then seized large amounts of cash when there was no evidence the drivers had done anything wrong.”

Mr. Sessions’ recognition that his department needs to more closely monitor its forfeiture practices to guard against abuse is a welcome development. But it falls far short of real reform.

“The changes really don’t go far enough and the core problem still remains,” said Rep. Issa in a statement. “Americans are still going to have their property taken from them, without due process, at record rates.”

Several states have recently strengthened safeguards to make it less likely that innocent owners lose their property through forfeiture. Congress must do the same.

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