Ohio Leads the Way for Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform in 2017
Ohio Governor Kasich signed legislation that requires a criminal conviction before law enforcement can confiscate property.
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
It’s a little over a week into 2017 and Ohio is already leading the way on civil asset forfeiture reform. On January 4th, Ohio Governor John Kasich signed legislation that would require a criminal conviction before civil asset forfeiture laws could be used by law enforcement to confiscate the property of regular Americans. This makes Ohio the 12th state to adopt this type of legislation.
2016 was a mixed year for reforming forfeiture laws. At the very end of 2015, the federal government announced that it would be putting its “Equitable Sharing Program” on hiatus, after federal omnibus legislation cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the program. In this program, state and local law enforcement agencies partner with the federal government to seize property from c
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Note: this is one in a series of posts on the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement s lengthy report on all things police-related.]
During his, shall we say… tumultuous single term as president, Donald Trump made it clear law enforcement people were better than regular people, even though a whole lot of regular people were saying otherwise at the time.
President Trump will honor our men and women in uniform and will support their mission of protecting the public. The dangerous anti-police atmosphere in America is wrong. The Trump Administration will end it.
SPOILER ALERT: the Trump Administration did
not end it. In fact, he and the DOJ s coddling of law enforcement may have made it worse. The DOJ scaled back its civil rights investigations of police departments and police departments responded by killing people just as often as they ever did, despite historic dips in violent crime rates. And when a white cop kneeled on an unarmed black man s neck until he was dead (and