Introduction

Jeana Horner is a law-abiding resident of Greenfield, Indiana, and a loving mother. Together with her late husband, Jack, she paid a heavy price for trying to help her adult son Jeremy get back on track after a brush with the law. Jeremy had pleaded guilty to a marijuana-related offense and been sentenced to a work-release program. Under the program’s terms, he needed to spend his days at his construction job and his nights at a county corrections facility. To help him get from place to place and do his job, Jeana and Jack allowed Jeremy to use their Ford pickup truck and Jeep Grand Cherokee while they were out of town during the summer of 2013.

While driving the Jeep in Marion County one August day, Jeremy was pulled over and arrested for marijuana possession. Police impounded the Jeep and found and seized the Ford pickup truck as well. Then prosecutors moved to keep the vehicles permanently. Jeana and Jack were entirely innocent, and the charges against Jeremy were eventually dismissed, but prosecutors did not care.

Jeana and Jack spent a month unsuccessfully trying to find out which agency had their vehicles. And that was just the beginning of a complicated legal process they had to retain an attorney to help them navigate. Over the next several months, Jeana and Jack had to file summary judgment papers and appear for a hearing in the Marion County Superior Court. Finally, in April 2014, the court ordered their vehicles returned to them. It was another three weeks before they got their vehicles back, one of them with damage.

All told, Jeana and Jack were without their vehicles for nine months, during which they had to purchase another car so that Jack, who suffered from serious health issues, could get around. ¹

The process that allowed Marion County police and prosecutors to seize and try to keep Jeana and Jack’s vehicles is called civil forfeiture. In Indiana—as in most states and at the federal level—law enforcement agencies can use civil forfeiture to seize and permanently keep cars, cash, homes, and other property if they allege the property is related to crime. In general, they do not have to arrest, charge, or convict anyone—not even the property’s owners. And in Indiana and most other states, the law enforcement agencies that seize property and the prosecutors’ offices that forfeit it receive a portion of any proceeds to spend with limited legislative oversight.

These realities mean that people who are innocent will inevitably lose property to civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture also gives police and prosecutors an incentive to pursue property over justice. And in Indiana, something else exacerbates that perverse incentive. The state allows prosecutors to farm out forfeiture cases to private attorneys who get paid only if they win, creating a conflict of interest that further clouds the pursuit of justice. Described as both a “scandal” and an “institutionalized bounty hunter system” in a leading civil forfeiture treatise, Indiana’s contingency-fee forfeiture scheme is the only one of its kind following the court-ordered elimination of a similar scheme in Georgia in 2012. ²

State law requires prosecutors to report information on their forfeiture cases, or lack thereof, to the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council. Prosecutors must also report information on forfeiture cases handled by private attorneys on a contingency-fee basis. IPAC, in turn, is required to compile this information into annual aggregate reports for the General Assembly. In theory, this provides much-needed transparency into forfeiture activity in the state. In practice, however, the quality of forfeiture reporting in Indiana is abysmal. My analysis finds that substantial numbers of forfeiture cases go unreported and that reported cases frequently contain errors.

In fact, from 2016 to 2021, almost 30% of known forfeiture cases in the state were not reported. Those unreported cases involved 144 vehicles and $6.2 million in currency forfeited under state law, as well as $3.8 million in seized currency transferred to the federal government for forfeiture under federal law. Put another way, over six years, prosecutors failed to report over $10 million worth of seizures and forfeitures. And across a random sample of 415 cases that were reported as required between 2019 and 2023, about two-thirds contained at least one error when compared with court documents.

As a result, prosecutors’ reports present an incomplete and frequently false picture of forfeiture activity in Indiana, undercutting transparency and accountability. Without reliable information, lawmakers cannot exercise meaningful authority over the state’s much criticized system, let alone identify needed reforms. Most worrying, the reports’ misleading data make Indiana’s forfeiture system appear more effective and less abusive than my analysis suggests it really is.