Speaker Series: Stephanie Holmes Didwania

Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to permanently take property that is thought to be connected to criminal activity. Every year, federal and state governments acquire billions of dollars’ worth of property (such as cash, electronics, homes, and vehicles) through asset fofeiture, and often use this money and property to fund law enforcement activities. The Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment prevents the government from conducting an asset forfeiture that is grossly disproportional to the gravity of the defendant’s offense. However, little case law clarifies what it means for a forfeiture to be excessive enough to violate the Eighth Amendment, and, in practice forfeitures are virtually never overturned on Eighth Amendment grounds.

This Article provides the first evidence of how ordinary people view the fairness of asset forfeiture across a variety of hypothetical scenarios motivated by real-life forfeiture practice. We find that the public’s perceptions of forfeiture converge in some ways and diverge in others from the approaches taken by law enforcement agencies and courts in conducting and evaluating asset forfeiture. We conclude by offering both concrete and broad guidance for courts, advocates, law enforcement agencies, and property owners.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Stephanie Holmes Didwania writes and teaches about criminal law and criminal procedure. Her scholarship uses empirical methods to study the criminal legal system. She is primarily interested in understanding how prosecutors exercise discretion in criminal cases and in federal pretrial detention. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in peer-reviewed journals such as the American Law and Economics Review, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Legal Studies, as well as in student-edited law journals such as the Northwestern University Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the Stanford Law Review.