Another Real Class Act(ion) At The Crossroads Of America

It’s no secret that Indiana’s civil forfeiture abuses are abundant, making the state a repeat player in our civil forfeiture litigation. 

Our unanimous U.S. Supreme Court victory in Timbs v. Indiana established that the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause applies to the states—and two follow-up victories at the Indiana Supreme Court set the gold standard for evaluating whether fines and forfeitures are excessive. We won a separate case establishing that civil forfeiture defendants in Indiana have the right to trial by jury. And an ongoing IJ class action gets at why forfeiture is so prevalent in Indiana: It’s the only state that outsources forfeiture prosecutions to private for-profit firms, who are paid more if they forfeit more. 

Our latest update from the Hoosier state comes in yet another class action that we launched last year. 

For years the state has exploited its place at the Crossroads of America. The Indianapolis airport houses the second-largest FedEx hub in the nation, where nearly 100,000 packages are routed each hour to their destinations. Police officers nab parcels they deem suspicious—for example, because the parcel was mailed to California or is taped on all sides. And when officers search those packages and find cash, the state sues to keep it.

We represent a mom-and-pop jewelry business that fell victim to these practices. The company’s sole owners and employees, Henry Cheng and his wife, Minh, live in California. When they learned that Indiana took and kept a cash payment mailed by a customer in Virginia, they fought back—not just for their business but for everyone finding themselves in a similar boat.

After IJ got involved, the state unsurprisingly returned the money to Henry and Minh. But that wouldn’t end the state’s abusive practices for everyone else. So we asked the court to certify the case as a class action—and in July, the court agreed.

That means that we can continue litigating on behalf of everyone nationwide who is facing or will face a similar FedEx forfeiture in Indy—all while we press forward to eliminate the perverse financial incentive at the heart of Indiana’s forfeiture regime.

Sam Gedge is an IJ senior attorney.