The Hampden County District Attorney's Office this week unveiled a new program in partnership with local schools, donating cars seized in criminal investigations.
The Forfeiture Used for Educational Learning program — or FUEL — was announced by the DA's office at Holyoke's Dean Technical High School, which received 13 cars that had previously been confiscated by police. Those cars will be used as educational tools by students at the school's automotive programs. Hampden County DA Anthony Gulluni says this is the first wave of FUEL, which could later expand to other technical schools in the area.
"Once a vehicle is no longer needed for law enforcement purposes and has been cleared for that transfer, ownership can be transferred to Holyoke Public Schools, or in the future, to other public school systems,"
Gulluni said.
Prior to this donation, automotive programs at Dean Tech had only a small pool of cars to work on. That created a bottleneck for students, who had limited opportunity to get hands-on with a vehicle according to Lexi Merced, a senior in the Auto Collision program.
"We would get stuff done, we would make damages, we would work on it and it would get a little boring sometimes," Merced said. "So for this to be here with us, to have more cars and have more opportunities to work on it is a really big deal here."
The DA's office was able to donate the cars through their use of civil asset forfeiture, the police practice of seizing cash, cars or property linked to a criminal investigation. The practice comes with some baggage in Massachusetts: a state commission on civil asset forfeiture in 2021 found police in the Commonwealth don't need much evidence to take assets, including from people not connected to a crime.
This year the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit which tracks civil asset forfeiture laws nationwide, gave Massachusetts a failing grade for its forfeiture laws. The state was the only one the country to receive an 'F' overall. That's due to the low evidentiary standards for seizure, and the fact that third-party owners — those whose assets were seized even though they weren't being investigated — have to prove their innocence in civil court to recover their property.
It's why civil liberties advocates have called for reforming the state's forfeiture laws. Katy Naples-Mitchell is part of the ACLU of Massachusetts' Justice Policy Counsel. She says another concerning element to civil asset forfeiture is that seized money can go back into a police department's operating budget.
"If law enforcement know that anything they seize, which again is subject to this pretty low [evidentiary] burden, directly goes to their own budgeting that creates potentially incentives that are ripe for abuse," she said.
Naples-Mitchell said that forfeiture programs like FUEL do have the ability to materially benefit local communities, but groups like the ACLU want to see donated assets come from a forfeiture process that has stronger protections for people whose property is taken by police.
"I think it sort of puts the cart before the horse to some extent," she said. "If we don't know for sure that the assets that are being seized have gone through that really robust process that we'd like to see."
DA Gulluni said he understands concerns about civil asset forfeiture, and supports reforming state laws on the practice He points to FUEL as an example of the good that can come from it.
"I would turn around and point to the young people who are going to benefit from these 13 vehicles used in drug crimes," Gulluni said. "And ended up in criminal cases and forfeited through a legal process by which a judge, according to the appropriate standard, said yes."
He said the Hampden DA's office tries to navigate common criticisms of forfeiture in what they choose to seize, avoiding taking small dollar amounts in low-stakes cases like drug possession.
"I think we've done a very good job staying well within the lines," Gulluni said. "Understanding some of the issues that come from it and doing our best to use the statute to the benefit of our communities here."
