"The "justification" for it is: a criminal can amass vast sums of money, then use it to buy so many top lawyers that he or she is untouchable"

So, logically follows that the ruling class is above the law?

They don't even try to pretend otherwise.

Mostly they are. Occasionally one is thrown to the wolves (looking at you, Bernie Madoff and Martha Stewart) to sustain the illusion that no one's above the law.

Given Martha's brand is doing exceptionally well and she uses her prison stay for gags in commercials and appearances on talk shows, more like thrown to a bunch of golden retriever puppies.

Her appearance on Ellen alongside Snoop was pretty funny, though.

> The "justification" for it is: a criminal can amass vast sums of money, then use it to buy so many top lawyers that he or she is untouchable.

So they're admitting the justice system is dysfunctional and the only way to fix it is via more dysfunction. It shouldn't matter how much money the defendant has. It works the other way, too. The gov has access to a vast number of resources compared to the people they try to convict. I sat on a jury and witnessed this myself. The defendant had a lone public defender, while the gov had an army of lawyers and public workers at their disposal.

This kind of makes sense, but then those same lawyers are willing to work on spec and get a larger cut of the money when returned. (aka, they have no incentive to fight this system)

> That may be a problem, but "fixing" the problem requires harming so many people who haven't committed any crime that the fix is worse than the problem.

According to Wikipedia there were only 15k asset forfeiture cases in 2010 in total, and that includes criminal forfeiture. Chances are many of them are either criminal money or are actually easily returned. So how many innocent people are actually affected by this?

So you're saying that if the government only steals money from a few innocent people, that's OK?

And "Chances are many of them are either criminal money": we have a process for determining if someone's a criminal. It doesn't involve the government just deciding that on its own.

> So you're saying that if the government only steals money from a few innocent people, that's OK?

Yes! Just like it is OK (as in better than nothing) to have innocent people imprisoned sometimes, or denied common rights unjustly due to judgement mistakes. Policies are hard like that. There's a thin line and to discuss them it is important to understand everything that will happen if you move one.

Policies are indeed hard, but there are basic principles to follow, like the right to due process before one is deprived of liberty or property. And having your property taken away and forcing you to file legal proceedings to get it back, with no interest paid for the intervening time, is very definitely being deprived of property.

Let's take a different case: Duterte in the Phillippines. "We know who's a drug dealer, so the police can just kill them. Yeah, maybe a few innocent people will get killed, but hey, small price to pay."

Is that too extreme? What if the police just rounded up people they thought were drug dealers and jailed them, putting the burden of proving their innocence on them?

"Innocent until proven guilty" - that's the policy that you cannot violate.

> the right to due process

Which is simply a process, written into the law.

> before one is deprived of liberty or property

I'd be curious to hear what the universal right to "due process" is, if it is not defined as above, and which would allow to arrest people on the crime scene or even better after a short chase from the crime scene, including the property they might have just stolen.

> Let's take a different case: Duterte in the Phillippines.

You said immediately after my comment, whose point was that how much exactly to move the line and which direction is the process of policing.