This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, January 28, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama's nominee for Attorney General seems unwilling to draw the important

distinction between civil and criminal asset forfeiture.

Adam Bates is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's project on criminal justice.

He says that distinction explains exactly why forfeiture needs reform.

Loretta Lynch is Barack Obama's nominee to replace Eric Holder at the Department of Justice as Attorney General and she was

questioned not uncivilly but pretty directly by US Senator Mike Lee of Utah about civil asset forfeiture and he tried to put it in the context

of what the average person would think of this as right or wrong when examining how it actually functions.

And her response was, forfeiture is an important tool.

It is a wonderful tool, and it takes the profit out of crime, but really

at no point did she draw any meaningful distinction between the two kinds of forfeiture that the federal government is involved in regularly,

which is civil asset forfeiture and criminal asset forfeiture.

Right, and I think that distinction is the entire issue, especially when you look at this situation

from the perspective of a normal American.

Criminal asset forfeiture is the idea that if you are engaged in some kind of criminal enterprise and you're

charged and convicted of that criminal enterprise, the instruments of that enterprise and

the proceeds from that enterprise shouldn't be yours.

They should be forfeited and I think even staunch opponents of civil asset forfeiture

might say that criminal asset forfeiture is fine.

Civil asset forfeiture, on the other hand,

is this idea that even if you're not, not only are you not convicted of any crime,

...