Our friends at the libertarian litigation firm the Institute for Justice (IJ) are trying to fight the insane world of civil asset forfeiture laws. Where the police can take your property without arrest, without prosecution, and without much of a reason. Where you must prove that you are innocent while fighting the presumption of guilt. Talk about turning the justice system on its head! Take a look at how ridiculous this crazy world is in this new IJ video:

In their massive Policing for Profit report, IJ graded each state’s asset forfeiture laws, and how they protect citizen’s property. Unfortunately, only 3 states in the entire country received a grade of “B” or better, with Colorado getting a hard-earned “C.” Our Justice Policy Initiative Director Mike Krause wrote briefly about the report and Colorado’s asset forfeiture laws in this article.

Those who claim to believe in “limited government” or “smaller government” or “Individual liberty” tend to focus on spending and government growth, entitlement programs and other forms of wealth transfer, and that’s all well and good.  But all too often, the coercive power of criminal law, and criminally enforceable regulatory law is overlooked.

In the 2004 Cato Institute book Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything, James V. DeLong writes, “It seems as if the Left and Right have entered into an agreement whereby each side gets to criminalize conduct it abhors so long as it lets the other side do the same.”

It has been a dysfunctional relationship to say the least.

As described in Go Directly to Jail, there are now thousands of federal crimes filling some 27,000 pages of the U.S. Code, plus an untold numbers of criminally enforceable regulations expressed in the tens of thousands of pages of the Code of Federal Regulations.

And it looks like things are only getting worse.

In early May, the conservative Heritage Foundation teamed up with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers to publish Without Intent: How Congress is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal Law.

The report finds that, “…the 109th Congress alone proposed 446 non-violent criminal offenses, 57 percent of which lacked an adequate guilty-mind requirement.”  Twenty-three of those inadequately protective offenses were enacted into law.

Other findings of egregious lawmaking activity by the 109th Congress includes:

• Criminal legislation was riddled with vague, far-reaching and imprecise language;
• Congress routinely delegated its authority to make criminal law to unaccountable regulators;
• Over half of all new criminal offenses were not sent to the House or Senate Judiciary Committees for review.

These findings  should set off loud alarms with limited government conservatives, civil libertarians, and anyone else who cares about unjust government encroachment into American liberties, and the integrity of the American justice system.

According to the Daily News, New York City’s multi-millionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun-grabbing mayors group is dropping a cool quarter-million dollars for an ad campaign, including one in Colorado, to pimp Bloomberg-supported federal legislation to close the alleged “gun show loophole.”  But it is not all smooth sailing

Last Tuesday (April 20)  Denver defense attorney Jeralyn Merrit wrote that, “for the first time since 2002″ she had rejected putting an ad on her excellent criminal justice and political blog, TalkLeft.com.  So what made her reject the ad?  According to Jeralyn:

It was an ad for gun control, that began in big letters, “Keep Guns Out of the Hands of Criminals” and urged people to support new laws on sales at gun shows. Given the focus of this blog, to protect the rights of those accused of crime and particularly, constitutional rights, I would have recoiled every time I logged on to my own blog.  So, even though it would have paid for TalkLeft’s hosting service for a full month (no small amount since we’re on our own server), I rejected it.

Way to stick to your guns, Jeralyn.

The Denver Post, on the other hand, had no problem taking an ad for Bloomberg’s bad gun bill.

Check out Independence Institute Research Director and Second Amendment scholar Dave Kopel in Saturday’s Denver Post in response to a full-page ad the Post ran urging Senator Mark Udall to get on-board the Bloomberg bandwagon.  Writes Kopel:

According to the ad, the Bloomberg bill would nationalize Colorado’s rule about background checks at gun shows. But in fact, only a small fraction of the Bloomberg bill addresses the issue of background checks. The rest of the bill has a much more aggressive agenda.

Check out the whole thing here.

On April 15, the Colorado House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed House Bill 1352, which nibbles at the edges of some of the more egregious aspects of the disastrous war on drugs by reforming some of Colorado’s controlled substance statutes.

This is a hugely important step for Colorado lawmakers in taking back their rightful prerogative to both write, and when necessary, re-write the state’s criminal code from the irrational drug law regime foisted on Coloradans by the federal government

In 1992, Colorado lawmakers enacted the Uniform Controlled Substances Act (USCA, Article 18 of Colorado’s criminal code).  The act was written to “complement” the federal Controlled Substances Act, and designed to bring state drug laws in to conformity with federal drug laws. The act, among many other things, created numerous new drug offenses in Colorado, and sentencing enhancements for those offenses.

In our Constitutional Republic, the authority and responsibility to write the state’s criminal law lies with the legislature.  In other words, the 1992 General Assembly willingly subjugated its prerogative to write Colorado’s criminal law to the dictates of federal drug war bureaucrats. What was the result?

Over the last several decades, the percentage of inmates whose most serious sentencing offense is a drug offense has quadrupled to around 20 percent of Colorado’s prison population. Drug offenders are by far the single largest category of new admissions to Colorado prisons at around 23 percent of annual admissions.

There are more drug offenders in Colorado prisons today than the entire prison population 25 years ago when the state’s inmate population was around 3,500.

In a January 1992 issue paper, published before the UCSA was enacted, Independence Institute Research Director Dave Kopel laid out the dangers in allowing unelected and unaccountable federal employees to decide Colorado law, asking:

Is an increment of presumed advantage in the drug war worth the price of warrantless searches, extreme and irrational punishments, pointless additional prison crowding, expansion of prosecutors’ power to take property from people never found guilty of a crime, and further abdication of state powers to federal bureaucrats?

The drug policy reform recommendations incorporated into House Bill 1352 are actually quite modest, having been exhaustively vetted by both the Drug Policy Task force of the Colorado Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice and by the voting members of the Commission itself, which includes representatives of the Attorney General’s Office, the Public Defender’s Office, the Department of Public Safety, prosecutors, chief’s of police, county sheriffs, drug treatment providers, legislators, and numerous other interested parties.

The Independence Institute has long advocated drug law reform.  In this 2005 issue paper, “Getting Smart on Crime: Time to Reform Colorado’s Drug Offense Sentencing Policies,” I recommend lowering both use and possession of illegal drugs from felony crimes to misdemeanors and the creation of sentencing grid for controlled substance offenses separate and distinct (and much less draconian) from the sentencing structure for violent and property crimes.

Here is what HB 1352 does with regard to drug possession offenses:

Here is what HB 1352 does with regard to marijuana offenses:

The bill is sponsored by Colorado Springs Republican Representative Mark Waller and by Senators Pat Steadman (D-Denver) and Shawn Mitchell (R-Broomfield). HB 1352 now heads to the Senate, and is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday, April 26.