As others have pointed out, the War on Drugs is really a War on People, and the US Supreme Court has just ratified the Chicago PD’s practice of grand theft auto. One insidious domestic face of the War on People is the practice of civil forfeiture, which allows the police to confiscate and profit from property involved in drug crimes, even when the owner of the property is not guilty of any crime.
In Alzarez v. Smith, six plaintiffs sued the City of Chicago because the city had stolen their cars and cash, alleging they were involved in drug crimes. Under the State of Illinois’s Drug Asset Forfeiture Procedure Act (DAFPA), an owner of property seized as a “drug asset” must wait at least 142 days, and possible more than 6 months, before the police are required to show cause for stealing the property, and it may take months after that before ther owner gets a hearing, even when the owner is never charged with a crime. Actually getting one’s property returned may take even longer. Only one plaintiff in Alvarez had property returned in less than a year (11 months!), and the city kept one plaintiff’s car for almost 3 and a half years before agreeing to return it. Even in a city like Chicago that has a mass transit system, having one’s car taken for more than three years is a significant hardship. I’d be out of a job and on the street if someone deprived me of a car for that long.
The Seventh Circuit held that the DAFPA was illegal as a violation of the Due Process Clause. Between the Seventh Circuit’s opinion and oral argument at the Supreme Court, the Plaintiffs reached a settlement with Chicago (all of the cars were returned to their rightful owners, two plaintiffs forfeited the cash, and one plaintiff reached a settlement to get some, but not all, of his money back). As a result, the US Supreme Court dismissed the appeal as moot. That’s fair enough–the dispute was, after all, resolved. The court went a step further though, and vacated the Third Circuit’s opinion.
It could have been worse, I suppose, if the court had reached the merits and decreed that DAFPA was not unconstitutional, but nonetheless, the court’s decision means that once again, DAFPA is valid law, and Chicago police can steal people’s cars with impunity. As The Volokh Conspiracy points out, the Court’s decision shows a disregard for Constitutional property rights and is almost certain to end up back in court. As Justice Stevens points out in his dissent (in part), “Judicial precedents are presumptively correct and valuable to the legal community as a whole. They are not merely the property of private litigants.”
