Yes. Civil asset forfeiture is one of the most fucked things about the American legal system. It gets worse and worse the more you learn about it.
In law school, we learned some historical background about civil procedure. I'm going from memory here, but the idea of charging property as opposed to a person ("in rem" proceedings) has been around for quite some time, at least since the early 1800s in the U.S., and I think it has, or at least had, some legitimate place in the common law system in general. I do not think it was a purely American invention, although I could be wrong. I would be very interested to learn what the lawyer AFers from other countries think about the general concept of in rem jurisdiction and where exactly the U.S. went wrong.
Walrus? ROD? How did things get so fucked up over here? My first thought is that this is brought on by the War on Drugs and/or the general trend toward more abusive, oppressive government in the U.S. What do you guys think?