Culley v. Marshall
The Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution requires only that a civil forfeiture hearing be held within a reasonable time — police do not also owe car owners a separate, earlier hearing before holding their property.
The 6-3 decision settled a split among federal appeals courts and means that, as a constitutional floor, states need not give innocent owners a chance to argue before a judge before their car sits in a police impound lot for months.
How it got here: Two district courts dismissed the lawsuits; the Eleventh Circuit consolidated and affirmed; the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case to resolve a split among federal appeals courts.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Halima Culley loaned her car to her college-age son, who was pulled over in Alabama, arrested for marijuana possession, and had the car seized. Around the same time, Lena Sutton loaned her car to a friend arrested on drug-trafficking charges; that car was seized too. Both women said they were innocent and had no knowledge of the criminal activity, yet had to fight for well over a year each to recover their vehicles through Alabama's civil forfeiture process.
The question before the Court
When police seize a car under civil forfeiture law, does the Constitution require a quick preliminary hearing to decide whether they can keep it while the full case plays out?
The Court's answer
No — the Constitution does not require a separate preliminary hearing before the government can hold a seized car while a civil forfeiture case proceeds. The Court held that its earlier decisions in United States v. $8,850 (1983) and United States v. Von Neumann (1986) already settled the issue: once a state seizes personal property for civil forfeiture, the Due Process Clause requires only that the full forfeiture hearing be held within a reasonable time. No additional "hearing before a hearing" is constitutionally required.
The Court also rejected the argument that a separate balancing test (from Mathews v. Eldridge) should require a preliminary hearing, noting that the Court decided both $8,850 and Von Neumann after that case and chose not to apply its framework. Historical practice — from the Founding era through the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment — reinforced the conclusion that civil forfeiture has never required preliminary hearings.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Innocent car owners in most states have no constitutional right to a prompt court hearing to challenge why police are holding their vehicle. They must wait for the full forfeiture case — which can drag on for months or years — before getting a judge's review. States are free to provide quicker hearings on their own, but the Constitution does not force them to.
What changes now
Both women already recovered their cars through the underlying Alabama state proceedings. Going forward, states are not constitutionally required to hold preliminary hearings before retaining seized property in civil forfeiture cases. Property owners can still challenge unreasonable delays in the forfeiture hearing itself using the $8,850 factors, and other aspects of civil forfeiture remain open to due process challenges. States and Congress remain free to provide more generous protections — and several already do.
What this does not decide
The ruling addresses only whether a separate preliminary hearing is constitutionally required — it does not resolve other due process challenges to civil forfeiture, such as challenges to notice procedures, the burden of proof, or unreasonable delays in scheduling the main forfeiture hearing. The Court explicitly preserved those claims for future cases.
Concurrences and dissents
Concurrence — Justice Gorsuch
Justice Gorsuch joined the majority but wrote separately — joined by Justice Thomas — to flag larger unresolved questions about whether modern civil forfeiture practices can survive the Constitution's original promise of due process. He traced the historical roots of civil forfeiture to narrow admiralty, customs, and revenue contexts, questioned whether today's expansive practices carry the same historical pedigree, catalogued the financial incentives that drive agencies to seize and hold property, and called on the Court to examine more fully in future cases how contemporary civil forfeiture aligns with constitutional guarantees.
Dissent — Justice Sotomayor
“Today, the Court holds that the Due Process Clause never requires that minimal safeguard. In doing so, it sweeps far more broadly than the narrow question presented and hamstrings lower courts from addressing myriad abuses of the civil forfeiture system.”The dissent's central objection: the majority decided more than it needed to and disabled case-by-case review of forfeiture abuses.
Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson, argued the majority reached far beyond the question it agreed to decide. She would have resolved only which due process test — the $8,850 speedy-trial factors or the Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test — governs whether a retention hearing is required, then sent the case back for lower courts to apply it. She argued $8,850 and Von Neumann involved claimants guilty of customs violations, not innocent owners, and that extending them to all civil forfeiture schemes issues an unjustified categorical rule that prevents courts from conducting the context-specific analysis due process demands.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court's starting point was the established rule that states may immediately seize personal property, like a car, when it is subject to civil forfeiture and could otherwise be moved, hidden, or destroyed before a hearing — but that the Due Process Clause still requires the resulting forfeiture hearing to be held in a timely fashion.
- Two prior Supreme Court decisions — United States v. $8,850 (1983) and United States v. Von Neumann (1986) — already answered the question. In $8,850, the Court held that timeliness in forfeiture cases is assessed using a four-factor test borrowed from speedy-trial law, weighing the length and reason for any delay, whether the owner pushed for a quicker hearing, and whether the delay caused real harm. In Von Neumann, the Court ruled that a timely forfeiture hearing 'without more' provides all the due process owed after a car is seized — no additional pre-forfeiture procedure is constitutionally required.
- The petitioners argued that the more general Mathews v. Eldridge balancing test — which weighs private interests, the risk of error, and government burden — should instead govern and would compel a preliminary hearing. The Court rejected this: $8,850 and Von Neumann were decided after Mathews and did not apply it, meaning the more specific forfeiture precedents control.
- The petitioners' analogy to criminal law also failed. The Fourth Amendment requires that anyone arrested without a warrant be brought before a judge within 48 hours, but those proceedings are non-adversarial and address only probable cause for detention. The petitioners sought full adversarial hearings where they could raise an 'innocent owner' defense — which would effectively give property more constitutional protection than a person's liberty. The Court said the Due Process Clause does not demand that incongruity.
- Historical practice from the Founding era forward reinforced the precedents. The first federal forfeiture law (the Collection Act of 1789) and comparable early state statutes all authorized seizure and holding of property pending a forfeiture trial with no preliminary hearing requirement. Neither the petitioners nor their supporting briefs identified a single federal or state statute before the late twentieth century that required one.
- Some states have recently enacted preliminary-hearing requirements on their own, but those legislative choices do not convert a policy preference into a constitutional command. The Court concluded that the longstanding absence of such hearings over two centuries of American law was strong evidence the Constitution does not require them.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Reaffirms United States v. $8,850 (461 U.S. 555)
Confirmed as the controlling standard for assessing whether a civil forfeiture hearing was held in a timely manner.
Reaffirms United States v. Von Neumann (474 U.S. 242)
Confirmed as settling that a timely forfeiture hearing is all due process requires — no separate preliminary hearing needed.
Distinguishes Mathews v. Eldridge (424 U.S. 319)
Found inapplicable to civil forfeiture because $8,850 and Von Neumann were decided after Mathews without using its balancing test.
Distinguishes United States v. James Daniel Good Real Property (510 U.S. 43)
Limited to real property, which cannot be moved; did not change the rule for personal property like cars.