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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

That's not how it works. The money can still be guilty of a crime outside of the Defendant's acquittal in civil cases like this.

source: hundreds of hours in forfeiture court

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Civil asset forfeiture should not be considered constitutional, and some day a test case will make it to the SCOTUS. As for this case though... the pardon does not make Ulbritch innocent! On the contrary, accepting the pardon implies guilt. So the pardon need not and might not extend to forfeitures. Though it's also possible that the presidential pardon could extend to the forfeitures, but I suspect that's a constitutional grey area.

Cases have made it to the Supreme Court --- recently! --- and it held up just fine. This is another message board fixation. I'm sure it's abused all over the place. It wasn't in this case.

If the cases start with: "US v $200,000", that probably needs to go away.

I doubt I would be able to get away with "bb88 v $2B". It should so belong to me.

https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/news/16740-civil-forfeiture-d... ?

That's not very conclusive.

What part of this makes you thing CAF is on shaky constitutional ground? This is a CAF case with reach-y fact patterns for the government and they won it handily. We didn't even get close to the question of whether CAF is itself constitutional; the court simply presumed it.

This was about the timing of a hearing about forfeiture, not about whether forfeiture is ok. Though I've not read this case yet, but now that I'm aware of it I'm keen to read it. I'll comment again later.

Civil asset forfeiture connected to an actual crime should be. You should not own the guns you used to murder someone else, e.g.

Otherwise it's "your $100,000 in dollars in cash looks guilty to me."

Right, if you've been found guilty, the your assets can be forfeited.

Pardon the money!

He can't. The President doesn't have civil pardon power.

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