The case of
United States of America v. 434 Main Street Street, Tewksbury,
Massachusetts is currently awaiting trial in the United
States District Court for the District of Massachusetts. At issue
is an attempt by the federal government, acting in cooperation with
local law enforcement, to use federal asset forfeiture law to seize
a family business, the Motel Caswell, because a tiny fraction of
the motel’s guests have been arrested for drug crimes over the past
two decades. In his latest Washington Post column, George
Will comes out swinging against this case of government abuse:

The Caswells have not been charged with, let alone convicted of,
a crime. They are being persecuted by two governments eager to
profit from what is antiseptically called the “equitable sharing”
of the fruits of civil forfeiture, a process of government
enrichment that often is indistinguishable from robbery….

Since 1994, about 30 motel customers have been arrested on
drug-dealing charges. Even if those police figures are accurate —
the police have a substantial monetary incentive to exaggerate —
these 30 episodes involved less than 5/100ths of 1 percent of the
125,000 rooms Caswell has rented over those more than 6,700 days.
Yet this is the government’s excuse for impoverishing the Caswells
by seizing this property, which is their only significant source of
income and all of their retirement security.

The government says the rooms were used to “facilitate” a crime.
It does not say the Caswells knew or even that they were supposed
to know what was going on in all their rooms all the time. Civil
forfeiture law treats citizens worse than criminals, requiring them
to prove their innocence — to prove they did everything possible to
prevent those rare crimes from occurring in a few of those rooms.
What counts as possible remains vague. The Caswells voluntarily
installed security cameras, they photocopy customers’
identifications and record their license plates, and they turn the
information over to the police, who have never asked the Caswells
to do more.

Read the rest of Will’s column
here. For more on asset-forfeiture abuse, see Radley Balko’s
2010 Reason feature “The
Forfeiture Racket.”