Brief challenges Miami-Dade’s asset-forfeiture fee deal

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(The Center Square) – The Miami-Dade County Sheriff’s Office’s agreement to pay a private lawyer a share of asset-forfeiture proceeds violates due process, the Goldwater Institute argued in a court brief filed Thursday.

The agreement, established in 2025, involves paying the lawyer a contingency fee to bring asset-forfeiture lawsuits, which allows the government to seize private property without proving the owner committed a crime.

The brief filed by the Goldwater Institute in the Florida Court of Appeals says the agreement violates due process and is unconstitutional.

“Asset forfeiture is an abusive and absurd practice that undermines respect for the law and transforms those who are supposed to be protectors into predators,” said Goldwater Institute Vice President for Legal Affairs Timothy Sandefur.

In one case, the lawyer brought a multi-million dollar forfeiture case against businesses that sell cellphones with the argument that drug dealers use cellphones and therefore the businesses selling the phones are liable.

So far, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Department has yet to seize assets as a result of the agreement as the case is ongoing, Sandefur told The Center Square.

The case involves $45 million in bank accounts, with potentially another $2.6 billion subject to forfeiture, Sandefur said. The lawyer in the agreement stands to gain an estimated $520 million if he wins the case.

Some states have outright made agreements like this illegal, including Georgia and California. In Florida, it is unconstitutional for the police to pay confidential informants with their pay contingent on getting a conviction. The brief argues this is the same thing.

“The court said that this created an incentive to "create" prosecutions—which is, of course, true here, too,” Sandefur told The Center Square. “In fact, this is worse, because in the case where a witnessis paid based on conviction, you can at least put the witness on the stand and ask him about that in front of a jury. But you can't do that in this case, because you can't put the prosecutor on the witness stand.”

The most widely known case involving a similar arrangement took place in Delaware County, Indiana in the late 1990s and early 2000s where a prosecutor was also working as a private attorney and collecting a part of the forfeited property. The Supreme Court suspended him from practicing law.

However, in the case of the Miami-Dade’s Sheriff’s Office, Sandefur said this exact type of arrangement hasn’t been done before.

“Most of the other cases that have touched on this question have involved either environmental cases, or something similar. There was a federal court in Indiana in 2024 which said that this sort of thing is perfectly fine in forfeiture cases—that's the case that our brief says was wrongly decided,” said Sandefur.