Seized Before Guilty: The Legal Mechanism Allowing Police to Take Everything You Own Without Charging You With a Crime

In September 2014, a Philadelphia caterer named Christos Sourovelis received a knock at the door of the home he had owned for years. Police informed him that his son had been arrested for drug possession nearby. The arrest was not made at the house. No drugs were found on the property. No charges were filed against Sourovelis or his wife. Within weeks, the city had filed suit — not against the family, but against the house itself — seeking to permanently confiscate it under civil asset forfeiture law.

The legal action was styled City of Philadelphia v. Real Property Located at 2544 Amber Street. The property was the defendant. The family was given no right to a court-appointed attorney because civil forfeiture is, by legal classification, a civil matter rather than a criminal one. They stood to lose their home of more than a decade because someone else committed an offense on a different block.

This is not an exceptional case. It is a representative one.

A Tool Designed for Cartels, Deployed Against Commuters

Civil asset forfeiture in its modern federal form traces to the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, which dramatically expanded the government's authority to seize property connected to drug offenses and, crucially, allowed law enforcement agencies to retain the proceeds of those seizures. The legislative intent was to drain the financial resources of major drug trafficking organizations — to hit the Medellin Cartel where its leadership cared most.

The incentive structure created by that legislation, however, did not distinguish between cartel accountants and college students carrying cash. Any property that law enforcement could plausibly connect to criminal activity — under a civil standard of proof far lower than the "beyond reasonable doubt" threshold required for criminal conviction — became subject to permanent seizure. And because the seizing agency kept the proceeds, the institutional pressure to seize aggressively was built directly into the funding model.

The results were predictable in retrospect. Between 2001 and 2014, the Justice Department's Assets Forfeiture Fund grew from $400 million to $4.5 billion. The Institute for Justice documented cases in which police seized cash from motorists who were carrying legal currency and never charged with any offense — the money taken on the theory that its quantity or denomination was suspicious. In one widely reported incident, an Amtrak passenger had $16,000 in cash confiscated by a DEA agent after a routine conversation; the money represented the passenger's life savings, and he had committed no crime.

The Perverse Logic of "Policing for Profit"

The term "policing for profit" entered the policy vocabulary through a landmark 2010 Institute for Justice report of the same name, which systematically documented the degree to which civil forfeiture had become a revenue strategy rather than a law enforcement tool. Subsequent academic research confirmed and extended those findings.

A study published in the Journal of Criminal Justice in 2019 found that forfeiture activity in Texas increased significantly in years when municipal budgets were constrained — a pattern inconsistent with the theory that seizures track criminal activity, and highly consistent with the theory that they track institutional financial need. Law enforcement agencies themselves have occasionally been candid about this dynamic: budget presentations in multiple jurisdictions have explicitly listed forfeiture revenue as a projected income line item, a practice that reveals the degree to which seizure has been normalized as a funding mechanism.

The constitutional architecture that permits this practice rests on a legal fiction with deep historical roots. Because forfeiture actions are filed against property rather than persons, they are classified as civil proceedings. The property is presumed guilty, in a manner of speaking, and its owner must affirmatively prove innocence to reclaim it. In most states and under federal law, the burden of proof falls on the claimant — the person whose belongings were taken — rather than on the government that took them.

This inversion of ordinary legal presumptions is not a technicality. It has profound practical consequences. Hiring an attorney to contest a forfeiture often costs more than the seized property is worth, which means that for a substantial proportion of victims — particularly those of modest means — the rational economic choice is to abandon the claim rather than pursue it. Law enforcement agencies are well aware of this calculus.

Faces Behind the Statistics

The abstraction of policy analysis dissolves quickly when individual cases are examined.

Russ Caswell, a Massachusetts motel owner, spent three years fighting a federal attempt to seize his family business — a property worth approximately $1.5 million — on the grounds that drug transactions had occurred on the premises over a twenty-year period. Caswell had cooperated with police in every instance he was aware of and had no criminal record. The government's case, ultimately defeated in court, relied on a forfeiture theory that would have allowed authorities to seize virtually any commercial property where crimes occasionally occurred.

In Tehama County, California, a dairy farmer named Joseph Rivers had $16,000 in cash seized from a bus by DEA agents who suspected, without filing any charges, that the money was drug-related. Rivers, who was transporting the cash to purchase music video equipment, spent months attempting to recover his savings before media attention prompted the agency to return the funds.

In Philadelphia — whose forfeiture program was among the most aggressive in the country before a 2015 reform consent decree — the city filed forfeiture actions against hundreds of homes annually, many involving residents whose connection to alleged criminal activity was as attenuated as proximity to a family member's arrest.

States That Chose a Different Path

The reform movement against civil asset forfeiture has achieved meaningful, if incomplete, victories at the state level. New Mexico enacted what advocates consider the gold standard of forfeiture reform in 2015, abolishing civil forfeiture entirely and requiring a criminal conviction before property can be permanently confiscated. Seized assets in New Mexico now flow to the state's general fund rather than to the seizing agency, eliminating the financial incentive that drives aggressive seizure practices.

Nebraska, North Carolina, and Montana have adopted similar conviction requirements. California strengthened its forfeiture protections in 2016, requiring a criminal conviction for forfeitures below a specified threshold and imposing additional procedural safeguards on larger seizures. Michigan's Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that the state's forfeiture statutes violated constitutional due process protections in certain applications, prompting legislative reform.

At the federal level, progress has been more halting. A 2015 Justice Department order temporarily suspended the Equitable Sharing Program — which allows state agencies to circumvent stricter state forfeiture laws by partnering with federal authorities — but the program was reinstated within months. Legislation to require federal conviction before federal forfeiture has been introduced in multiple congressional sessions without advancing to a floor vote.

The Constitutional Question That Demands an Answer

At its foundation, civil asset forfeiture as currently practiced presents a straightforward challenge to principles that Americans have considered settled since the founding era. The Fifth Amendment prohibits the deprivation of property without due process of law. The Eighth Amendment bars excessive fines. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable seizures.

Federal courts have, for decades, interpreted these protections narrowly in the forfeiture context, deferring to legislative judgments about the necessity of the practice. The Supreme Court's 2019 decision in Timbs v. Indiana — holding unanimously that the Eighth Amendment's excessive fines clause applies to the states — signaled a potential recalibration, though its full implications for forfeiture practice remain to be worked out in subsequent litigation.

What no legal interpretation can obscure is the moral arithmetic. A government that takes property from people who have not been convicted of crimes, retains that property to fund its own operations, and places the burden of recovery on those it has dispossessed, has arranged its institutions in a manner that serves itself at the expense of the citizens it exists to protect. The remedy is not complicated: require conviction, eliminate the profit motive, and restore the presumption that property, like liberty, belongs to the individual until the state proves otherwise.