Leonard asked the Supreme Court to overturn their decisions on due-process grounds. Because Leonard hadn’t raised that claim in the state courts during her initial appeal, Thomas agreed with his colleagues’ decision to decline review of it at their stage of the legal process. But he also sent a clear signal that he’d like to revisit the issue in the future. “Whether this Court’s treatment of the broad modern forfeiture practice can be justified by the narrow historical one is certainly worthy of consideration in greater detail,” he concluded.

Thomas isn’t the only one to question civil forfeiture in recent years. The practice allows law-enforcement agencies to seize cash, assets, and property from people suspected of criminal activity. While forms of the practice have existed since the country’s founding, a history Thomas himself acknowledged, state and federal agencies dramatically expanded its usage in the last 30 years during the war on drugs. That’s come with lucrative benefits for the agencies conducting the seizures, since many of them are able to keep the proceeds of what they take.

“This system—where police can seize property with limited judicial oversight and retain it for their own use—has led to egregious and well-chronicled abuses,” Thomas wrote in his statement. He cited a New Yorker article on a small Texas town where police and prosecutors collaborate to seize cash and goods from out-of-town motorists passing through, then split the proceeds between themselves. “These forfeiture operations frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests in forfeiture proceedings,” he noted.

Law-enforcement agencies often defend forfeiture as a valuable tool when tackling drug cartels and white-collar criminals. But forfeiture’s critics often echo Thomas’s concern that ordinary people, not the El Chapos and Bernie Madoffs of the world, are far more likely to be dispossessed by the process. Even among the consensus issues of liberal and conservative criminal-justice reformers, it stands out as a common villain. A report by the Heritage Foundation, one of the right’s most influential think tanks, concluded in 2015 that forfeiture laws are “in serious need of reform.” The American Civil Liberties Union has long contended that modern forfeiture violates the Constitution’s due-process protections, as Leonard argued.

Federal watchdogs have also challenged the government’s forfeiture practices. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General released a report Wednesday on its investigation into the department’s forfeiture programs, which have brought in about $28 billion over the last decade. It focused on seizures by the Drug Enforcement Agency, which accounts for about 80 percent of the Justice Department’s total haul. Civil forfeiture can be profitable for the agency: The report said the DEA has seized roughly $4.15 billion in cash alone since 2007. (Other assets like cars and property weren’t counted, and they can bring in even larger sums.)