These forfeiture trials are criminal trials. If the government is suing over a breech of contract or something that’s a civil matter, but when the government is acting with powers outside of those of a normal citizen it’s a criminal trial in everything but name.
So it’s doubly troubling as they are also ignoring the presumption of innocence and other such protections.
These forfeiture trials are not criminal trials. There are plenty of ways you can be civilly liable without breach of contract.
I do think the standard should be higher than a typical civil case (beyond preponderance of the evidence).
But this artifact of law has a reason to exist: if there's stuff that's most likely involved in a crime with no identifiable owner, it makes sense for it to be seized. Especially the original case of distant and difficult to identify ship owners. (Once an owner can be identified, I do think there should be greater protections-- deriving from the fourth, not the sixth, amendment.
We both agree with what’s going on and that it’s wrong.
I am saying the court system is misclassifying criminal cases as civil ones. You want to increase the standard of evidence which IMO means roughly the same thing. But, I can see why you might disagree.
There are quite a lot of kinds of case that don't fall neatly into one or the other. Another one (at least in England and Wales) is contempt of court hearings arising from civil proceedings. Judges have powers against, for example, litigants ignoring their orders. They're clearly coercive, and can carry prison sentences, but they aren't clearly criminal: the original judge can handle it summarily (even if they don't sit in criminal cases) and in any case the rules are those of the Civil Procedure Code (not the Criminal one). On the other hand, the contemnor is expressly given access to a lawyer, and a finding of contempt is on the criminal standard ('beyond reasonable doubt') rather than the civil ('the balance of probabilities').
An interesting instance of this happened recently, when an appellant in a civil case to our Supreme Court (who also happened to be a lawyer) deliberately leaked the court's draft opinion to the press while it was under embargo. The court wasn't sure what to do, as contempt findings carry an automatic right of appeal and yet there's no-one to appeal to from the supreme court.
(As we have more than one benchful of Supreme Court justices, they decided to assemble one panel for the 'first instance' hearing, which was itself distinct from that who had heard the original case, and a completely fresh panel for the appeal[0]. He was fined £5000 and the appeal was dismissed on all grounds.)
Allegations of fraud in a civil case have also historically been treated differently, because losing could have a similar effect on a litigant's reputation (and ability to carry out a business) as a criminal conviction. It's sometimes possible to get a civil jury trial under these circumstances, for example, which have been effectively abolished in this jurisdiction.
So it’s doubly troubling as they are also ignoring the presumption of innocence and other such protections.