
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 8, 1993                   TAG: 9309020352
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: JARRET B. WOLLSTEIN
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE GOVERNMENT'S WAR ON PROPERTY

``A POLICE DOG scratched at your luggage, so we're confiscating your life savings and you'll never get it back.'' In 1989, police stopped 49-year-old Ethel Hylton at Houston's Hobby Airport and told her she was under arrest because a drug dog had scratched at her luggage. Agents searched her bags and strip-searched her, but they found no drugs.

They did find $39,110 in cash, money she had received from an insurance settlement and her life savings, accumulated through more than 20 years of work as a hotel housekeeper and hospital janitor. Ethel Hylton documented where she got the money and was never charged with a crime. The police kept her money anyway. Nearly four years later, she is still trying to get it back.

Ethel Hylton is just one of a large and growing list of Americans - now numbering in the hundreds of thousands - who have been victimized by civil asset forfeiture. Under civil forfeiture, everything you own can be legally taken away from you without indictment, trial or conviction.

Suspicion of offenses which, if proven, might result in a $200 fine or probation, are being used to justify seizure of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of property. Thousands of innocent Americans are losing their cars, homes, back accounts and businesses, based upon the claims of unidentified ``informants'' that illegal transactions took place on their property.

Legal rights and protections that Americans have cherished for hundreds of years have been increasingly violated during the last two decades. Most of what you learned in school about your legal rights and protections is no longer true. A combination of rising crime, the growing power of government and increasing concern about drugs have done tremendous damage to the Bill of Rights and our heritage of liberty.Few Americans realize how grave and how ominous that damage has been. Today, the government has the power to legally seize your bank account, your house or your business, without trial, hearing or indictment. Everything you have worked for and accumulated over a lifetime can be taken away from you at the whim of authorities. Black or white, rich or poor, we are all potential victims. And unless the laws are changed, there is very little you can legally do to protect your property.

Civil asset forfeiture is based upon the medieval doctrine that when property is involved in a crime, the property becomes ``guilty,'' and can be ``arrested'' and forfeited, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the property's owners. Under civil asset forfeiture, property - not an individual - is charged with an offense. For anyone's home, car or business to be seized in America today, all government agents have to show is that they have ``probable cause'' to suspect that the property ``might have been'' involved in an offense.

Civil asset forfeiture may be the beginning of the end of justice in America. Legal protections that we have relied upon since the founding of this country are nearly gone: the presumption of innocence, the right to trial by jury, prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments, the ban on government taking property without just compensation, and the fundamental right of each of us to live our lives free from government harassment. These protections are not just expendable legal technicalities or abstract ideas. They are the very life blood of any decent, humane and free society.

\ Jarret B. Wollstein is a director of the International Society for Individual Liberty. This column is excerpted from The Freeman, a monthly journal of The Foundation for Economic Education.

by CNB