Dewonna Goodridge, a 57-year-old Junction City resident, says she worked 12-hour shifts, six days a week as a machine operator to save money on her 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe.
All it took for Kansas law enforcement to catch her last June was a traffic stop that didn’t involve her and an unsubstantiated claim that there were crumbs of marijuana in the center console of her truck.
Goodridge fought for more than eight months to get his truck back. Prosecutors in Geary County, Kansas, agreed earlier this month to return it after Goodrich contested the seizure with the help of the Kansas Institute for Justice and the law firm Joseph, Hollander & Craft.
“I just didn’t think it was right because I worked really hard to get this vehicle,” he says. “They knew when they ran the license plates that it was all coming back to me, and I just couldn’t understand. I couldn’t let them take my truck like that.”
Goodridge’s case is an example of the poor protections for innocent property owners in civil forfeiture proceedings, and comes at the same time that Kansas lawmakers are working on significant reforms to the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws because of stories like the her.
Under civil asset forfeiture laws, police can seize property suspected of being linked to criminal activity such as drug trafficking, even if the owner is never charged with a crime, and even in cases where there is no physical evidence that a crime has occurred.
Law enforcement officials say civil asset forfeiture allows them to dismantle organized crime such as drug trafficking by targeting illicit proceeds. However, a wide range of civil liberties groups argue that there are too few protections for property owners, who often bear the burden and cost of going to court to prove their innocence.
Goodridge’s case began in June of last year, when Geary County sheriff’s deputies stopped her son, who was driving his Tahoe, for several alleged traffic violations. (The Kansas Institute for Justice argued in a motion to repress that the initial alleged infraction, namely failure to signal when exiting a roundabout, was not in fact a violation and that the remainder of the subsequent traffic stops and searches were illegal.)
After Goodridge’s son was arrested, Geary officers brought in a drug dog. According to an affidavit from one of the arresting officers, the dog alerted on Goodridge’s truck. The officer also said he found “shakes” — small crumbs of marijuana — in the center console of the truck, though the affidavit goes on to point out that “no evidence was collected upon completion of the search of the vehicle.”
Goodridge’s son was walking towards her, so she was at the scene of the traffic stop. She knew her son was going to be arrested, but she had no idea he wouldn’t be allowed to reclaim her truck.
“They did the research,” Goodridge recalls. “[The officer] he returned to his car, turned on the radio, and then said, “My supervisor told me to impound the truck, so you won’t get it back.”
In pending forfeiture notice filed last August, more than a month after the initial seizure, the Geary County Prosecutor’s Office said Goodridge’s 2007 Chevrolet Tahoe “represents the proceeds of illegal drug transactions, or was used, or intended to be used to facilitate drug transactions.” The affidavit noted that at the time of his arrest, Goodridge’s son had a case pending in court on marijuana charges, but had not been charged with any new drug crimes following the traffic stop, nor was Goodridge.
Goodridge filed a petition last October citing Kansas statute that is supposed to protect innocent property owners from forfeiture when they have no knowledge of the alleged criminal activity. However, the government did not respond, missing the November deadline. It wasn’t until February 22, several weeks after Goodridge’s attorneys filed motions for a probable cause hearing and to suppress the traffic stop evidence, that Geary County prosecutors responded, announcing they were filing the case and return Goodridge’s truck.
Goodridge says losing her truck for eight months took a toll on her and her family, who suddenly lost their only reliable, large vehicle.
“I have to get up early to take my daughter-in-law to work and come back and get her and take all the kids to all the sporting events and pick them up from practices and stuff like that,” Goodridge says. “It was pure hell.”
Cases like Goodridge’s, in which an innocent owner’s vehicle is seized for an alleged crime he didn’t commit, are not unusual.
Before Albuquerque concluded its asset forfeiture program, would owners of strength, even innocent owners, to pay $850 to recover their cars. In the case of Arlene Harjo, a resident of Albuquerque, the city offered return his car for $4,000 after his son was arrested for drunk driving.
In 2016, an elderly couple filed a civil rights lawsuit defying Arizona’s civil forfeiture laws after sheriff’s deputies stopped the son, who was driving their car, seized $31,000 in cash they found inside and also seized the car, despite neither neither the couple nor their son have ever been charged with a crime.
Goodridge’s eight-month wait is also not unusual. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Detroit’s asset forfeiture plan violated residents’ constitutional rights by forcing them to wait months for hearings challenging the validity of the seizures. One of the plaintiffs in that case waited two years for a hearing.
The Supreme Court is currently considering whether property owners are entitled to due process for a speedy post-seizure hearing, in response to two lawsuits from two Alabama women who were deprived of their cars for months as they struggled to prove of being, like Goodridge, innocent owners.
In response to scandalous stories like these, many states have passed civil asset forfeiture reforms to strengthen protections for innocent property owners. However, Kansas is not one of them.
The Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning public interest law firm, gave Kansas a Grade “D-“. in its most recent 50-state survey of asset forfeiture laws, citing the state’s low bar on property forfeiture; little protection for innocent owners, who bear the burden of proving their innocence; and the large profit incentive for law enforcement.
A 2022 report from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFPF) found that law enforcement in Kansas it grossed $21 million through civil asset forfeiture between 2019 and 2021. In these cases, less than a quarter of the owners were convicted of a crime.
The two houses of the Kansas Legislature are currently trying to resolve differences between two major asset forfeiture reform bills. THE Kansas Spotlight reported in February that “both bills would remove the crime of drug possession from the list of forfeiture offenses, shorten the period of time required to return property to the owner, require a judge to approve a probable cause affidavit before a forfeiture case can proceed, and allow defendants who have recovered more than half of their property to recover their attorney’s fees and litigation costs.”
The proposed reforms are welcome news for Goodridge. And that should be welcome news to all Kansans, because while what happened to Goodridge is common, the outcome of his case is not. The AFPF analysis found that nine out of 10 property owners never got their property back after it was seized by Kansas law enforcement.
“Dewonna’s case kind of exemplifies how unjust forfeiture is,” says Sam MacRoberts, litigation director of the Kansas Justice Institute. “On the other hand, her case is a rarity because she actually got her car back.”