Culley v. Marshall | The Federalist Society

Facts of the Case

Provided by Oyez

On February 17, 2019, Halima Tariffa Culley’s son was pulled over by police while driving a car registered to his mother. Police arrested him, charged him with possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, and seized the vehicle. Culley unsuccessfully tried to retrieve the vehicle, and on February 27, 2019, the State of Alabama filed a civil asset forfeiture action in state court. After 20 months, the state court granted Culley summary judgment, finding that she was entitled to the return of her vehicle under Alabama’s innocent-owner defense.

Culley filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court claiming under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 that the failure of the state and local officials to provide a prompt post-deprivation hearing violated their rights under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. The district court ruled for the defendants, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed as to those claims that were not moot.

Questions

What test must a district court apply when determining whether and when a post-deprivation hearing is required under the Due Process Clause?

Conclusions

In civil forfeiture cases involving personal property, the Due Process Clause requires a timely forfeiture hearing but does not require a separate preliminary hearing. Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored the 6-3 majority opinion of the Court.

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment generally requires notice and a hearing before the government seizes property. However, the Court’s precedents differentiate between real property, which can be neither moved nor concealed, personal property risks being removed, destroyed, or concealed before a civil forfeiture hearing. Thus, as the Court recognized in United States v. $8,850 and United States v. Von Neumann, a timely post-seizure forfeiture hearing provides the constitutionally required process after seizing personal property. For such personal property, a separate preliminary hearing before the forfeiture hearing is not required. In contrast, in United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property, the Court held that the government must ordinarily provide notice and a hearing before seizing real property that is subject to civil forfeiture. Here, the property subject to forfeiture is a vehicle—personal property—so a timely post-seizure forfeiture hearing is all the Due Process Clause requires.

Justice Neil Gorsuch authored a concurring opinion, in which Justice Clarence Thomas joined, agreeing in large part with the majority’s reasoning and conclusions but writing separately to highlight some of the many larger questions this decision leaves unresolved about whether, and to what extent, contemporary civil forfeiture practices can be squared with the Constitution’s promise of due process.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor authored a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined. Justice Sotomayor argued that the majority’s opinion is too broad and prevents “lower courts from addressing myriad abuses of the civil forfeiture system.” She, on the other hand, “would have decided only which due process test governs whether a retention hearing is required and left it to the lower courts to apply that test to different civil forfeiture schemes.”