News
By WND Staff
11-12-23
The fights over civil forfeiture have been ramping up across America in recent years, fights in which people challenge the government’s decision to come in and simply confiscate property, from houses to cars to cash, from them.
As the governments’ processes mostly involve no criminal charges, it’s all a civil court fight and those property owners often have to spend thousands of dollars on lawyers to try to retrieve their property.
Now there’s a change coming, apparently.
The Institute for Justice, which has run a campaign to battle those forfeiture agendas, explains the Indiana Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that defendants in those cases, at least in that state, have a right to a jury trial.
In recent years, the organization explained, “prosecutors across Indiana had resisted efforts by property owners to have their civil-forfeiture cases heard by a jury of their peers.”
But applying the Indiana Constitution, the state high court said property owners “in an action brought under Indiana’s civil forfeiture statute have a constitutional right to trial by jury.”
Read the full article here: Major ruling for Americans targeted for civil forfeiture (wnd.com)
