Cite as: 507 U. S. 111 (1993)
Kennedy, J., dissenting
gible value. If the Government is to drain the criminal's economic power, it must be able to pierce donative transfers and recapture the property given in the exchange. It is serious and surprising that the plurality today denies the Government the right to pursue the same ownership claims that under traditional and well-settled principles any other claimant or trust beneficiary or rightful owner could assert against a possessor who took for no value and who has no title or interest greater than that of the transferor.
Another oddity now given to us by the plurality's interpretation is that a gratuitous transferee must forfeit the proceeds of a drug deal if she knew of the drug deal before she received the proceeds but not if she discovered it a moment after. Yet in the latter instance, the donee, having given no value, is in no different position from the donee who had knowledge all along, save perhaps that she might have had a brief expectation the gift was clean. By contrast, the good-faith purchaser for value who, after an exchange of assets, finds out about his trading partner's illegal conduct has undergone a significant change in circumstances: He has paid fair value for those proceeds in a transaction which, as a practical matter in most cases, he cannot reverse.
III
The statutory puzzle the plurality and concurrence find so engaging is created because of a false premise, the premise that the possessor of an asset subject to forfeiture does not stand in the position of the transferor but must be charged with some guilty knowledge of her own. Forfeiture proceedings, though, are directed at an asset, and a donee in general has no more than the ownership rights of the donor. By denying this simple principle, the plurality rips out the most effective enforcement provisions in all of the drug forfeiture laws. I would reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals, and with all due respect, I dissent from the judgment of the Court.
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