On Tuesday, Alabama Appleseed joined a diverse set of twelve organizations asking the U.S. Supreme Court to find that the Eighth Amendment’s excessive fines clause applies to the states. The case is Timbs v. Indiana. Mr. Timbs was arrested during an undercover drug enforcement operation, pled guilty, paid approximately $1,200 in fees, and was sentenced to home detention and probation. Months after his arrest, the government initiated a civil proceeding to forfeit Mr. Timbs’ personal vehicle that he had purchased with the proceeds of his father’s life insurance policy.
“Civil asset forfeiture has evolved from a program intended to strip illicit profits from drug kingpins into a revenue-generating scheme for law enforcement that is widely used against people — disproportionately African American — accused of low-level crimes or no crime at all,” said Frank Knaack, executive director of Alabama Appleseed. “We join a diverse set of organizations including the Drug Policy Alliance, FreedomWorks, NAACP, and Americans for Prosperity in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to recognize that civil asset forfeiture’s current incarnation has become a stark example of the abuse of power that the excessive fines clause was meant to curtail.”
This amicus brief highlights the broad, ideologically diverse consensus around the need to restrain governmental abuse of civil asset forfeiture programs. In addition to Alabama Appleseed, signatories to the brief include the Drug Policy Alliance, FreedomWorks, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law School, Americans for Prosperity, Law Enforcement Action Partnership, Independence Institute (Colorado), Libertas (Utah), Colorado Criminal Defense Bar, Drug Policy Forum of Hawai’i, and the Rio Grande Foundation (New Mexico).
The brief can be found here.
For more information about how Alabama law enforcement abuse civil asset forfeiture, read our report here (cited in the amicus).
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