With some context, though, I can see where they're coming from. Let's say some DEA officers raid a home with a warrant, then find a stash of coke and $50K in cash with that stash. Whether they get the perps is irrelevant at this point. I would presume the money with the coke is illegal cash that can be seized.
Now in another context (argument against), some cops pull over a stolen vehicle. Inside, they find that the driver is a suspected drug dealer that the DEA is looking for, so they arrest him. Then they find $5K in cash on his body as well, so they seize it and hand it over to the feds.
The problem that I see is that situation 1 may seem cut and dry, but situation 2 doesn't. What if the owner of the vehicle has a legitimate cash business and is on his way somewhere with the cash before it got stolen? Or what if the perp is the wrong guy? And he's just borrowing his "friend's" car? We don't know that. We don't know anything.
Here's another thing, though. Last I checked, the DEA is severely overloaded with casework, so they aren't exactly going after the pot grows and the small time dealers. They're going after the big fish. That's a limited number of people. If this applies to the DEA only as the article is implying, it doesn't seem that bad....
But despite that, It is still wrong to seize those assets until the court has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the evidence was used in a crime of some sort. ALL American residents are protected under the Bill of Rights, regardless of how cut and dry it may look. We can't grant exceptions to just certain situations. Otherwise, we'll just grant them to everything... at that point, the BoR will be moot, and we'll be living under tyranny once again. Why get the snowball started?
