76
The Court says that there is no "plausible claim of urgency today to justify the summary seizure of real property under § 881(a)(7)." Ante, at 61. But we said precisely the opposite in Calero-Toledo: "The considerations that justified postponement of notice and hearing in those cases are present here." 416 U. S., at 679. The only distinction between this case and Calero-Toledo is that the property forfeited here was realty, whereas the yacht in Calero-Toledo was personalty.
It is entirely spurious to say, as the Court does, that executive urgency depends on the nature of the property sought to be forfeited. The Court reaches its anomalous result by mischaracterizing Calero-Toledo, stating that the movability of the yacht there at issue was "[c]entral to our analysis." Ante, at 52. What we actually said in Calero-Toledo, however, was that "preseizure notice and hearing might frustrate the interests served by [forfeiture] statutes, since the property seized—as here, a yacht—will often be of a sort that could be removed to another jurisdiction, destroyed, or concealed, if advance warning of confiscation were given." 416 U. S., at 679 (emphasis added). The fact that the yacht could be sunk or sailed away was relevant to, but hardly dispositive of, the due process analysis. In any event, land and buildings are subject to damage or destruction. See ante, at 72 (Rehnquist, C. J., concurring in part and dissenting in part). Moreover, that was just one of the three justifications on which we relied in upholding the forfeiture in Calero-Toledo. The other two—the importance of the governmental purpose and the fact that the seizure was made by government officials rather than private parties—are without a doubt equally present in this case, as The Chief Justice's opinion demonstrates. Ante, at 71-72.
III
My second disagreement is with the Court's holding that the Government acted unconstitutionally in seizing this real
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