You might assume, as any rational person would, that if the police illegally stop your vehicle and then illegally search it, and find cash and a small amount of cocaine, that the police would not be able to use the illegal search to justify forfeiture of your car. You would reason that police should not be rewarded with your car for acting unlawfully. After all, you might reason, Texas has the exclusionary rule (38.23) which provides that “[n]o evidence obtained by an officer or other person in violation of the any provisions of the Constitution or laws of the State of Texas, or the Constitution or laws of the United States of America, shall be admitted in evidence against the accused on the trial of any criminal case”—if police obtain evidence illegally, we punish the police by not permitting the evidence to be used; the idea is to deter illegally police behavior. What sane person would give the police your vehicle where the police had acted illegally in stopping and searching it?
You would be dead wrong on all assumptions. And the Texas Supreme Court would hand your vehicle over to police who had illegal stopped and searched it.
What the hell happened? To do this, you would have to ignore the purpose of the exclusionary rule itself (to deter police from behaving illegally), and claim it be largely addressed elsewhere; grossly inflate the purpose of the concept of civil forfeiture (to deter people from behaving illegally) and severely overestimate its impact in this sense; and hang the entire thing on the presence of the word “criminal” in the Texas Exclusionary Rule (“…“no evidence obtained by an officer or other person in violation of the any provisions of the Constitution or laws of the State of Texas, or the Constitution or laws of the United States of America, shall be admitted in evidence against the accused on the trial of any criminal case”).
In the now (im)famous forfeiture case styled State of Texas v. One (1) Lincoln Navigator, VIN No. 5LMFU27RX4LJ2842, (and referred to simply as, “One Lincoln,” among lawyers and legal types), the Supreme Court of Texas held the exclusionary rule inapplicable to civil forfeiture cases.
To fully appreciate and understand how crazy this was, you have to realize that, for decades, lawyers had learned that forfeiture law was a quasi-criminal proceeding, governed by civil law and discovery. The fact that a search occurred illegally, or that a criminal charge was no-billed (not indicted/not charged) used to matter, at least in counties like Denton. (It used to also be assumed that police would actually need to find something illegal in your car in additional to cash to seize the cash, but those days are gone as well.) Under a general concept of fairness, we had all collectively agreed that if the police acted unlawfully in searching your new car, the police should not be allowed to have your new car forfeited to them. Fairness ruled the day.
Yes, the Texas Exclusionary Rule uses the phrase “criminal case.” But dumping the need for police to lawfully search your property because of this phrase feels a lot like trying to get home warranty companies to replace your dishwasher when they refuse to do so because, though the “dishwasher” is listed as covered, the “pan” (which is a part of the dishwasher to most people, and is featured in the diagram as a part of the dishwasher) is excluded from coverage—it makes no sense in reality.
And, like the home warranty example, it’s not fair. Fairness, however, appears to have died an abrupt death in One Lincoln. Sayeth the Supreme Court of Texas, in “One Lincoln”: “accordingly, we hold that Chapter 59 [covering civil forfeiture in criminal cases] neither provides for the exclusion of illegal obtained evidence nor requires the State to prove lawful seizure as a prerequisite to commencing a forfeiture proceeding.” Translation: to take your car, house, cash, or other property from you in a forfeiture action, the State is not required to prove that it acted legally in searching your property.