The drugs didn’t belong to Latonya Shaw. That was what authorities determined when they reduced her drug charges to a single count of obstruction, according to her lawyer. She was later sentenced to a year’s probation.

But that didn’t stop authorities in Hudson County from taking the $7,020 she had planned to use on a new apartment for her three children. Instead, prosecutors went after the money under a controversial legal maneuver that allows law enforcement take money used in criminal enterprises and use it to toward their own budgets.

“They were forced to stay with her mom for a full year,” said Liza Weisberg, a fellow with the ACLU who represented her in the case. “It was a huge blow to her and her mother.”

Her lost money is only a small chunk of the total seized by cops through civil forfeiture, a process under which law enforcement can take cash, cars and property from suspected criminals, according to a new ACLU-NJ report.

Civil forfeiture has been heavily targeted by criminal justice advocates, who say the process takes defendants' money without due process. But not much was known about where and how cops used civil forfeiture — until the ACLU sued for, and won, the right to access cases under public records laws.

After battling with county prosecutors' offices, the ACLU compiled five months of data, from January through May 2016, and found:

Police departments in New Jersey seized $5.5 million in 1,860 cases over that time period, roughly $37,000 per day, along with 234 cars and, in one case, a house.

Jersey City is a outlier when it comes to forfeiture. Cops there seized suspects' property 346 times, the highest number in the state, and at a rate more than 6 times the state average.

Once police officers took suspects' money, it was rare for them to see it again. Only 50 cases in the data were even contested by the suspects.

The ACLU did not track the criminal status of each suspect in the data, so it’s hard to say how many people who had property taken were innocent. But Joseph Russo, a public defender in Hudson County, said even people who have a solid case to get their money back have trouble navigating the process, since civil forfeiture cases — unlike criminal cases — do not come with the automatic right to an attorney.

“If they can’t afford a private lawyer, are they really receiving due process?” he said.

Robert Bianchi, a former Morris County prosecutor, said he saw civil forfeiture funds as helpful for funding optional law enforcement programs that aren’t paid for in the municipal budget. During his tenure, the county used those funds to get new computer equipment.

But he said moderation is key, and departments shouldn’t use their desire for forfeited funds to decide what to do.

“You have to balance your needs with mercy and compassion,” he said. “Many of these people will lose their jobs and their families. Now you’re moving to take their money and their cars, too.”

A minor charge leads to a long battle for a refund

The most common charges were drug-related, forming at least 43 percent of all cases, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis of data from the ACLU.

Shaw was a passenger in a friend’s car in 2017 in Jersey City when the police pulled it over, according to police records. When the cops found PCP in the vehicle, they charged both her and the driver — but the driver quickly confessed that the drugs were his, and Shaw’s charges were reduced to only a fourth-degree obstruction charge. She was sentenced to a year’s probation.

The seizure of her $7,020, loaned from her mother’s tax refund while she went apartment-hunting, proved harder to fight. Weisberg said the Hudson County prosecutor had a hard time believing Shaw didn’t have a bank account.

“Most of us don’t walk around with cash, but if you don’t trust financial institutions or have a bank account, it makes a lot of sense,” Weisberg said.

Civil forfeiture cases are not classified as criminal charges but as civil complaints, so the prosecutor has a lower burden of proof than would be needed in a criminal case, Bianchi said.

Suspects also aren’t entitled to legal representation. The ACLU got involved after Shaw’s public defender in her criminal charges found out about the forfeiture and asked them to help her, Weisberg said.

After a year of heated negotiations, the state returned Shaw’s money and she was able to move out of her mother’s place.

Jersey City was one of several urban areas with a high rate of forfeiture. Among municipalities with more than 20 seizures, Jersey City had the highest rate of seizures per person, followed by Trenton, Paterson, and Newark. County-level, Hudson County was first in the state by number of cases, even though it is only the fourth-largest county.

Design/development: Carla Astudillo

In its report, the ACLU criticized the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office for combining unrelated forfeiture suits into a single case so that it could be heard in Superior Court. The filing fee for challenging forfeiture cases in court is $175, often higher than the amount taken, according to the report.

Hudson County stopped the practice in September 2017, Weisberg said. The prosecutor’s office were not able to answer requests for comment via phone and email in time for publication.

From sex toys to half a million in cash

Most of the seizures the ACLU found were for smaller amounts than in Shaw’s case. The median amount seized per case was $582, according to NJ Advance Media’s analysis. Nor were the vehicles police took expensive sports cars. The top car listed was a Toyota Camry.

No amount was too large, and no item too insignificant, to be added to a civil forfeiture case. The top forfeiture, in Newton, took $610,000 in cash from a life coach sentenced to 10 years in prison for sexually assaulting children. In another case in Warren, police seized $291,000 and two Rolex watches from a cocaine and heroin dealer also sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Bergen County had the highest amount seized in total, taking more than $800,000, even though it had fewer cases than Hudson, Essex and Passaic counties.

On the other hand, sometimes the items taken were almost comically cheap or small. Among the items prosecutors listed: a maroon plastic garment bag, baseball cards, a computer mouse and one blue “sex toy/vibrator.”

In one Middlesex County case against a massage parlor charged with prostitution, prosecutors attached a request for distribution of forfeited property to law enforcement. The property included a $300 massage table and a $100 towel warmer.

For most cases, it’s hard to say exactly where forfeited funds ended up. Cash goes to a single account run by the county prosecutor’s office, which is required to spend it on law enforcement-related items only, said Bianchi, the former Morris County prosecutor.

The account is audited and an account of spending is sent to the Attorney General’s Office, Bianchi said. During his tenure, local agencies requested and received funds for a new internal affairs system and software to do a predictive analysis on crime.

“These things cost money,” he said.

He believes that prosecutors should use discretion to decide how much to take, and when to take it. If a man has a kilogram of cocaine in his car and pleads guilty, he said, that’s fair game.

“If a child is using mom and dad’s car to commute and gets caught selling some joints, that’s not a sufficient reason,” he said.

Looking for reform

If your assets are seized over criminal allegations, there are a few things you can do to help your case. Russo said he usually advises his criminal case clients to request a stay in the civil-forfeiture proceedings until the criminal charges are decided.

But to do that, they have to represent themselves in the forfeiture case, which can get confusing for the legally challenged. That’s what happened in Luis Melendez’s trial, Russo said.

Melendez had $2,900 seized from him after being arrested for weapons and drug offenses. In challenging the seizure, he admitted the cash was his, which prosecutors used as evidence in the criminal trial, according to court records.

In April, the Superior Court ruled that prosecutors were allowed to use that evidence, but conceded that the process to challenge civil forfeiture cases was unfair. It recommended that counties give notice to defendants about their civil forfeiture case to the criminal defense lawyer as well.

The New Jersey Supreme Court is planning to hear the case next year, Weisberg said. She’s noticed county prosecutors are already complying with the Superior Court ruling, but doesn’t think it goes far enough.

One bill making the rounds through the state Legislature would establish reporting requirements for each county, making them share what they took, whether the case was challenged, and how the suspect was represented. The legislation passed the Senate in July and is now awaiting a vote in the Assembly.

“We’re hoping we won’t have to do all this work again,” Weisberg said.

Erin Petenko may be reached at epetenko@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @EPetenko. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Disha Raychaudhuri may be reached at draychaudhuri@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Disha_RC.