He hasn’t yet sent federal agents into the ever-growing number of states that legalize medical and recreational marijuana, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions is becoming the kind of law enforcement officer that criminal justice reformers feared he would be from the start.
On Wednesday, Sessions declared that civil asset forfeiture was back. It didn’t go anywhere, mind you. The controversial process in which police can not only seize property like cars and cash they suspect are connected to a crime, but profit from it too, was gently restricted at the federal level by former-Obama Attorney General Eric Holder. Now, under Sessions, no matter what state law says, “Under the Attorney General’s Order, federal adoption of all types of assets seized lawfully by state or local law enforcement under their respective state laws is authorized whenever the conduct giving rise to the seizure violates federal law.”
Sessions claims that law enforcement is going to prioritize assets associated with violent drug crimes, but there is no reason why police won’t just go back to using the Drug War to buy their departments new toys, as they’ve been doing for the past 30 years.
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