Two local cases are drawing fresh attention to a legal practice that lets Alabama law enforcement agencies take cash, cars and other property from people who have never been charged with a crime.
In one case, Mobile County sheriff’s deputies pulled over a Georgia man driving 10 mph over the speed limit on Interstate 10 back in 2013. During the stop, deputies seized more than $75,000 the driver said he intended to use to buy a Chinese restaurant in Louisiana. In a separate case last year, a Mobile man’s car ended up in a high-speed chase while his daughter’s boyfriend was behind the wheel. Prichard police seized the vehicle afterward.
Neither driver was ever accused of criminal wrongdoing tied to the seized property. But under Alabama’s civil asset forfeiture laws, authorities can take control of money, vehicles and even houses without filing criminal charges against the owner.
Darpana Sheth, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, spoke to a Mobile chapter of a national lawyers’ group this past week, telling the group the practice is rife with abuse and creates a troubling incentive structure for police departments, which are often permitted to keep seized property for their own agencies’ use.
The local attorney who represented the Mobile man in the Prichard vehicle case took the case for free after his law office was mistakenly listed as the address for the prosecutor handling it. He said he was skeptical of his client’s account at first, but the more he examined the case, the more he realized just how one-sided the process was: police only had to clear a low bar to argue the vehicle had been used in a crime, after which the burden shifted to the car’s owner to prove he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing.
The case eventually made its way through Mobile County Circuit Court, and police allowed the man to keep driving the car to his shipyard job in Pascagoula while it was pending. Still, resolving it took weeks and would have cost thousands of dollars in legal fees had the attorney not represented him without charge. The Georgia man in the interstate stop fared worse, spending ten months and thousands of dollars in legal fees fighting to recover his $75,195, missing his opportunity to buy the restaurant in the process.
According to an Institute for Justice analysis, Alabama ranks near the bottom nationally in forfeiture-law protections for property owners. The state’s burden of proof for authorities is the lowest allowed under the law, and in most cases it falls to the owner to prove innocence, except when the seized property is a house. Police departments that carry out the seizures keep 100 percent of the proceeds, with no requirement that they publicly account for how the money is spent.
Reform advocates are pushing for changes including placing seized assets in a neutral fund rather than police department coffers, raising the state’s burden of proof, strengthening legal protections for innocent property owners, guaranteeing prompt court hearings, and requiring law enforcement to publicly report what they seize and how proceeds are used.