If you consider that it should compensate you for the money it took off you, then Colorado has a law on the books governing the compensation process, which Thomas (and the previous court - the Colorado Supreme Court) thinks you should follow.

The majority opinion seems to be that not quickly returning (and it considered it as returning rather than compensating) the innocent parties property offends their right to due process.

Which in the general case is pretty clearly true. If someone is arrested and found not guilty, have their conviction overturned on appeal, etc. they're not in general entitled to payment for lost wages, legal costs, etc. It seems reasonable to consider this a different situation in that it involved a specific fine but I can at least see the counterargument that it's not.

I'm guessing that you're not making any distinction between negative rights (which is what the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution deal with) versus the more modern idea of positive right.

Negative rights are those where the government is constrained from interfering with you; freedom of speech and the right to keep and bear arms are obvious examples of this.

Positive rights are those where we say that a person has an right to GET a thing, and so the government must be obligated to provide it. The Constitution does not guarantee any of this [1].

In that context, it seems correct to view 9A as saying that there exist additional unenumerated negative rights. But trying to do so with positive rights eventually gets into trouble, because there's no clear ceiling on how much of something is due to each person.

So for example, there's a thing going around Facebook with Jimmy Kimmel about healthcare, which has everyone saying that no one should never need to consider finances when their child is sick. This is plainly false in the general case, because it would imply infinite resources. In the real world, there will always be a point at which we must say "no more".

IMHO, given that the Constitution was written in the context of the Enlightenment idea of negative rights, and positive rights hadn't been part of the discussion; together with the fact that the limits of positive rights are thus left completely undefined, I'm quite OK with the Court deciding to keep a tight leash on that.

[1] Although I suppose the right to an attorney when accused is kinda fuzzy. But it doesn't suffer from the problem of open-ended obligations that I discuss later.

The rest of the Constitution discusses various powers accorded to the Federal Government and how it is structured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_liberty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_liberty

That's not "plainly" false, unless you know some medical treatments that cost an infinite amount of money to perform. If we assume that less than 1% of patients are catastrophically expensive, then based on actual data it looks like dropping them all would save less than 20% of total spending, possibly a lot less.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-iowa-2...

That depends very much on your interpretation. Habeus corpus. The right to bear arms. The right to confront witnesses against you. Trial by jury. Equal protection. All those seem like "positive rights" to me.

Furthermore, it seems to me that you are doing exactly what the 9th amendment prohibits: you are extrapolating from the enumerated rights to make inferences about non-enumerated rights, and to conclude that because all of the enumerated rights fit some pattern that you discern, all of the non-enumerated rights must fit the same pattern, and so you can deny and disparage those non-enumerated rights that don't fit your perceived pattern.

Well, no. The 9th amendment was specifically intended to prohibit this kind of reasoning. Some of the framers didn't want a Bill of Rights at all because they were afraid (and apparently rightly so) that people would mount exactly the kind of argument that you are mounting.

I'm not sure you understand the concept. It's never been seriously suggested that the right to keep and bear arms implies that the government must supply a gun for me. The right to habeas corpus doesn't say that the government has to do anything to make me comfortable, just that I retain ownership of my person. Equal protection doesn't say anything about equal outcomes, just that the law must not view any of us differently.

There really is a fundamental difference in saying that the government must not do something (the negative rights angle), versus that the government provide us something (the positive rights angle).

To me this is a total no-brainer: the answer is obviously yes, notwithstanding that the Constitution does not explicitly say so. I don't see any point in quibbling over what flavor of right this is.

In terms of a contract or in modern welfare state entitlements (such as Social Security), "rights" indeed refer to benefits owed. Kimmel wasn't referring to the Federalist Papers when he made his speech; it was an informal humanitarian modern-welfare-state understanding of "rights".

I agree that there should probably be some limit to the amount an insurance company needs to fulfill claims, otherwise our premiums are likewise unbounded. The NHS and Canadian health systems appear to have rate limiting aspects (perhaps unintended) that have the outcome of bounding costs.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/politics/26scotus.html

I think it's an interesting argument. But I think you also have to consider why the money is considered to be "in the public pool", and whose interests are at stake when it is. It is clearly in the defendant's interest that the money is still considered a taking as long as he is alive. It is only in the state's interest in the event that the defendant is exonerated or in the case that the money must be tracked explicitly. It is an observational fact that some convicts will be exonerated.

It seems therefore that the interest of the state must outweigh the interests of exonerated defendants in order for us to assume the money can be considered only as part of the public pool after it is taken. When we ask whether it is a compelling interest that the state be able to retain money from vacated convictions or that all convicted money be tracked, it seems that this would be the case only if the state's financial status were dependent on money obtained from criminal convictions. Such a state would seem to resemble pre-civilized governments and it is this assumption that I reject with due horror. The state must not be an organism dependent on judicial takings.

The majority relied on "procedures" and "due process".

Alito focussed on the fact that they were not guilty and obviously had a right to get it back.

Thomas' dissent took the majority to task for not providing a clear opinion as to whether the category of the funds in this particular case was in the same category as attorney's fee and other costs that you clearly do no get back.

Unfortunately I don't think this case provides much of a basis for overturning civil forfeiture.

(NB I am not a lawyer; not even American!)

But from a... well, moral perspective (I hate to bring morality into a legal discussion but it is really where I draw my sense of these things), it's wrong because it provides a path for someone who has done no wrong to be harmed without providing a path for them to be restored.