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WASHINGTON Attorney General Eric Holder on Friday barred local and state police from using federal law to seize cash, cars and other property without proving that a crime occurred.

Holder's action represents the most sweeping check on police power to confiscate personal property since the seizures began three decades ago as part of the war on drugs.

Since 2008, thousands of local and state police agencies have made more than 55,000 seizures of cash and property worth $3 billion under a civil asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department called Equitable Sharing.

It has enabled local and state police to make seizures and then have them adopted by federal agencies, which share in the proceeds. The program allowed police departments and drug task forces to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds of the adopted seizures, with the rest going to federal agencies.

With this new policy, effective immediately, the Justice Department is taking an important step to prohibit federal agency adoptions of state and local seizures, except for public safety reasons, Holder said in a statement.

News of Holder's decision stunned advocates who have for a long time unsuccessfully sought to reverse civil asset forfeiture laws, arguing that they undermine core American values, such as property rights and due process.

It's high time we put an end to this damaging practice, said David Harris, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Pittsburgh. It has been a civil-liberties debacle and a stain on American criminal justice.

Members of both parties in Congress have been working together to craft legislation to overhaul civil asset forfeiture. On Jan. 9, Sens. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, and Mike Lee, R-Utah, along with Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., R-Wis., and John Conyers Jr., D-Mich., signed a letter calling on Holder to end Equitable Sharing.

Grassley praised Holder's decision.

We're going to have a fairer justice system because of it, Grassley said. The rule of law ought to protect innocent people, and civil asset forfeiture hurt a lot of people.

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Holder bars state, local police use of seizure tactic