Nevada Judge to Nevada Cops: You Can't Use This Loophole To Get Around Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform
The Nevada Highway Patrol exceeded its legal authority when it seized nearly $90,000 in cash from Stephen Lara in 2023 and then handed the case to the DEA.
In the first decision of its kind in Nevada, a judge ruled last week that state law enforcement can't evade stricter requirements for seizing cash and property by partnering with the federal government.
The plaintiff in that lawsuit, a Marine veteran named Stephen Lara, had nearly $90,000 in cash seized from him in 2021 by two Nevada Highway Patrol officers. The cops admitted to Lara that there was nothing illegal about carrying large amounts of cash. But they decided that Lara's money was likely drug proceeds, and they coordinated with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to forfeit it through a process called civil asset forfeiture.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, sued the NHP and DEA on Lara's behalf in 2021, arguing not only that should Lara get his money back—the DEA agreed to return it shortly after the suit was filed—but that the NHP exceeded its legal authority to hand the case over to the feds rather than following Nevada's stricter asset forfeiture laws.
This was the first time Nevada courts had considered police participation in the Justice Department's Equitable Sharing Program, in which federal law enforcement "adopts" civil forfeiture cases from local police. The local department gets up to 80 percent of the forfeiture proceeds, and the rest goes into a Justice Department pool that is doled out to other participating departments around the country.
Nevada Second Judicial District Judge Connie J. Steinheimer held that forfeiture laws are required to be strictly interpreted, and that there was no way to do that while allowing the NHP to unilaterally undercut them.
"Without a clear dictate from the Nevada Legislature," she wrote, "NHP cannot undermine this bedrock policy and effectively circumvent Nevada's civil asset forfeiture statutes by electing to participate in the federal equitable sharing program."
Steinheimer ruled that just because the federal government has the authority to adopt forfeiture cases doesn't mean state police have the authority to accept the offer.
In a press release, Ben Field, an Institute for Justice attorney, called the ruling "a big step toward ending the abuse of civil forfeiture nationwide."
Under typical civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being connected to illegal activity even if the owner isn't charged with a crime. Law enforcement groups say the practice is a critical tool to disrupt drug trafficking and other organized crime. But media investigations and civil liberties groups have documented for years how innocent owners like Lara bear the burden of going to court to prove their innocence after their property is seized on flimsy suspicions.
In response, more than half of all states have passed some form of civil asset forfeiture reform. But local and state police have often gotten around those laws by participating in the equitable sharing program. For example, North Carolina effectively abolished civil forfeiture and now requires all proceeds to fund schools, but in 2023 a sex crime victim was denied a $69,000 court-ordered settlement from her abuser because local police seized the cash first and then allowed the federal government to adopt the forfeiture case.
Cases like these have led to calls to pass legislation to close the equitable sharing loophole, as its critics call it. Bipartisan members of Congress have repeatedly introduced the FAIR Act in recent years. The legislation includes several major reforms to civil asset forfeiture at the federal level, including eliminating the equitable sharing fund.
The NHP argued in its motions opposing Lara's suit that it would be absurd to require the legislature to expressly permit it to accept standing offers from the federal government.
The NHP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
