This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, October 1st, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown. New Mexico recently eliminated civil asset forfeiture entirely.

That's the process by which police take your property

and may never convict you or even charge you with a crime. Paul guessing is president of the

Rio Grande Foundation. We spoke at the State Policy Network's annual meeting this week.

Many states have civil asset forfeiture. The overwhelming majority of states have civil

asset forfeiture. The federal government and states cooperate on

civil asset forfeiture, but New Mexico has done away with it. That's right.

How? Well, amazingly enough, it was a unanimous move by New Mexico's

legislature in the 2015 legislative session and the bill was then signed by Governor Susanna Martinez a former

prosecutor so to say that it's an unlikely story and a feel-good story would be a bit of an understatement. It was yes the first and

foremost civil asset forfeiture is a process by which your goods, your property can be seized, essentially

being charged by the government with a crime, the property itself, and then taken, criminal asset forfeiture would imply a criminal

conviction and that is the process as it exists now in New Mexico. You do have to be convicted of a crime if your goods are going to be seized by the state or the government.

That's a very good thing and according to the organization Freedom Works of all the 50 states,

New Mexico has the best laws relating to forfeiture of any state in the country and we're very proud of that.

It's almost unbelievable to most people, even some police, that this is routine in states.

Yeah, once you actually explore and see the details of the process of civil asset forfeiture,

it becomes pretty outrageous to anyone no matter where they are

in the political spectrum. Unless of course you are getting money directly from that process.

If your budget for policing is in large part due to that process,

then you may support it.

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