Civil liberties make unusual bedfellows.
If you follow the Alaska Legislature, you know this byline is the equivalent of pigs taking flight or a glacier in hell. For people who have a life outside politics, let us explain: We the authors, Rep. Tammie Wilson, R-North Pole, and Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, D-Sitka, inhabit what could be described as disparate real estate on the political-philosophical spectrum.
With regularity, and with abundant good cheer, we cancel out each other's votes on the floor of the Alaska House of Representatives. Board of Fish confirmations, University of Alaska budget, Common Core. You name it, we are like chocolate and vanilla, oil and vinegar, Coke and Pepsi, Tesla and Edison. We are expert agreeable disagreers.
When we're burning the 10 p.m. oil in our offices on a Monday night, one of us will wander down the hall to the other's office, pop our head in about X or Y or Z and ask, " What do you think?"
When we see X or Y or Z the same way, we work together.
We're writing today about an issue we agree on, and we think you'll agree, too.
It's called civil asset forfeiture. It infringes on our civil liberties and we want to enact reforms.
What is civil asset forfeiture? Those are three pretty legal sounding words stacked up on top of each other, and they don't mean anything intelligible to a normal person.
We can explain. Civil asset forfeiture is the ability of law enforcement to take your private property without charging you with a crime, and potentially even dispose of or sell your private property and keep the proceeds.
Sounds at least a little crazy, right? Asset forfeiture law gives police broad authority to take or seize property of people if they have probable cause that the private property was involved in criminal activity. The owner of the property that has been seized does not have to be convicted of a crime.
If your private property is seized through civil asset forfeiture, the onus is on you to get it back. You have to prove a negative: that your private property was not related to criminal activity. In other words, you're presumed guilty unless proven otherwise.
That sounds at least a little crazy, too, right?
Nationally, criminal charges are not filed 80 percent of the time private property is seized through civil asset forfeiture. And yet, the owners of private property seized in that way rarely get their stuff back. Because private citizens are not entitled to legal assistance in these civil cases, those who are hit hardest by civil seizures are those who can least afford to fight back.
The way private property gets seized through civil forfeiture laws has become so distorted from lawmakers' original intent that Brad Cates, who headed the Asset Forfeiture Office at the U.S. Department of Justice from 1983 to 1989, has since become a vocal opponent of civil forfeiture laws, calling them "fundamentally at odds with our judicial system and notions of fairness."
Unfortunately, a recent report from the Institute for Justice assessed Alaska's laws relating to civil seizure of private property as highly problematic.
Also unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the full scope of the problem in Alaska because there are no record-keeping or reporting requirements on the seizure of private property through civil asset forfeiture.
We want to eliminate the seizure of private property through civil asset forfeiture. The government should not be able to take your property when you have not been convicted of a crime. That's what House Bill 317 corrects.
It's a good bill. We want you to know about it and we want to urge its passage — and you to urge its passage — in the Alaska Legislature this session.
Rep. Tammie Wilson, R-North Pole/Fairbanks, has served in the Alaska House of Representatives since 2009. Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, D-Sitka, has served since 2012.
The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com or click here to submit via any web browser.