not guilty != convicted
suspected != convicted
If the bar is convicted (and it should be) then the argument will be the same. not guilty != convicted
suspected != convicted
If the bar is convicted (and it should be) then the argument will be the same.Generally, not, as a matter of law. Civil forfeiture is usually premised on the item being gained through or used in illegal (though not necessarily criminal) activity, not necessarily by the owner (innocent parties with an interest in the property have some rights in forfeiture proceedings, separate from the right to assert that the basic premise of the forfeiture is false.)
This often overlaps with the owner of the property being suspected of a crime, but being owned by someone who committed a crime is not generally the essence of the legal premise.
That's quite distinct from what happened here, where the actual conviction is the legal premise, and thus the conviction being overturned voids the legal premise.
But it's clear, even outside of forfeiture, that that isn't a requirement for losing property to the state for wrongful conduct; civil process (with the government having a cause of action) does exist even outside of forfeiture, even for conduct which also has criminal punishment.
There has never been a principal accepted in this country that all government legal remedies against individuals require criminal conviction, which is what you seem to be asserting ad the principal with forfeiture.
It's clear that certain types of penalties require criminal conviction, and it's clear (now at least, though that should have been obvious before) that penalties expressly premised on criminal conviction require criminal conviction. But forfeiture doesn't really fall into either of those categories.
At some point in time someone arguing for the state was able to successfully introduce property as a "defendant" of a legal action, and average people go along with that. This is, on the face of it, absurd.
All of law exists only to a single purpose, the regulation of actions between humans, not trees, not dogs, not bits of paper with numbers printed on them, human beings.
Even someone's example of confiscating counterfeit money is not an action against the wrong doing of the money. It's an action against a human being who believed they were in possession of the money. They are the ones who suffer harm.
It is only reasonable for the state to confiscate the "money" from the subject, in this case because it is not money, and as such the harm to the subject was done not by the state's action of confiscation, but by the counterfeiter's action of tricking the subject into accepting it. It follows that it is not reasonable for the state to replace the fake money with real money because that would cause harm to a third party (the state). However, the subject would have a reasonable clam of restitution against the counterfeiter should they be convicted, and the state should support that claim.
Labeling an action as forfeiture, as in the case of civil forfeiture, implies a default due to some failure to perform, but that should be proven to the same degree as any question of law. The property does not act, or fail to act, only people can do that. Therefore the state must be obligated to prove that it has reasonable clam to the property, and that the party injured by confiscation are themselves guilty to the degree that such injury is warranted. AND as is the typical structure of law the state suffers the burden of proof to offset the potential for abuse of power.