If you're like me, you work hard, pay your taxes, and try to stay respectful towards the laws of the land.

But just because you wouldn't steal someone's car, clothes, or home, doesn't mean your own government would treat you with that same courtesy.

There's an old rule that many countries abide by when enforcing their laws. If you're accused of a crime, you're innocent until proven guilty.

However, this doesn't always get followed.

And sometimes the government itself is responsible. Imagine you're casually driving

down the road one day when suddenly the police pull you over and ask if you have any large sums of

cash in the car. Would you be worried? Suspicious, perhaps? Because you should be. The cops might only

be asking so they can take it from you. Yeah, you heard that right.

Civil asset forfeiture is a law in the United States, which gives police the power to

seize any of your belongings.

Wait, what?

All they need to do is claim your possessions are associated with a crime, and they don't

need any proof whatsoever.

In fact, if police steal your stuff like this, you're never even charged with committing a crime. The stuff they stole is charged instead.

Yeah, seriously.

In civil forfeiture cases, the charges are issued against the property, not the owner of the property.

But if the cases go to court, proving the property's

innocence still falls on the owner. This has led to some wildly wacky court cases, like, you know,

the state versus a solid gold rooster statue, 50,000 boxes of clacker balls, and even an entire

Tyrannosaurus batar skeleton. Wow. Great job, Sheriff. We can all sleep sadly tonight knowing there's no undead dinosaurs roaming the streets.

Sure, some seizure cases seem pretty silly, but unfortunately the majority are far more worrying,

and the courts almost always rule in the cops' favor. Between 2001 and

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