Last week the Supreme Court issued a landmark unanimous decision that the Eighth Amendment’s protections against excessive fines apply to the states, not just to the federal government. The decision was hailed by many as a major blow to the practice of civil asset forfeiture—when law enforcement agencies permanently seize property or money tied to criminal activity. However, despite the importance of the decision, experts familiar with civil asset forfeiture in Illinois caution that it won’t necessarily change much about the unfairness of the practice.
In 2017, the ACLU of Illinois and allied groups successfully lobbied for reforms to the state civil asset forfeiture statute. Under the new law, property owners no longer have to pay to argue against the forfeiture in court. Law enforcement must auction off, rather than keep, forfeited property. The burden of proof for forfeiture has been shifted onto the state—it now has to make a more solid case for the property owner’s involvement in the crime to hang on to the seized assets (the presumption is no longer that the property owner is guilty). Finally, the new law requires the Illinois State Police to maintain a public database on civil asset forfeiture statewide, which is supposed to go live in 2020.
“Now that the question has been definitively settled,” Ruddell says, “I think you’ll see a lot of litigation being filed for people seeking to challenge forfeitures on [Eighth Amendment] grounds.” He’s hopeful that more legal aid groups will find resources to take these cases on behalf of low-income people whose lives can be wrecked by the loss of a car, house, or other asset “contaminated” by a crime they may not have committed.
