It’s called “civil forfeiture,” and there’s a real chance the police may use it to take all your stuff for no reason.

Yesterday on Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver discussed the mechanism with which police can simply sieze your property without convicting you of a crime. It’s kind of tough to fight this action in court, because the government took all your money and likely left you unable to pay a lawyer. See what they did there?

The practice has netted the U.S. government over $2.5 billion in cash since 9/11, and that’s only in the 61,998 cases where nobody was charged with a crime. Law enforcement can get away with this because technically you aren’t the one on trial; it’s your stuff that a “preponderance of the evidence” suggests might be used to commit a crime, and it is presumed guilty until proven innocent. This is how we end up with real-life cases such as “The United States of America v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins.”

The fact that police departments can often keep 100 percent of the cash they obtain from these seizures-and have no limitations on what they can use the cash for-does nothing to prevent abuse of a law meant to be deployed against things like drug cartels, not private citizens. As the Columbia, Mo. police chief put it, however, departments treat seizure funds as “pennies from heaven. It gets you a toy or something that you need.”

Yikes.

Given the widespread abuse of the law, there’s almost nothing about it that makes sense. Right now, there’s nobody out there better at pointing this out than John Oliver.

Also, is it too much to ask for Law and Order: Civil Forfeiture Unit starring Jeff Goldblum to become a real show?

[via Gawker]