Cite as: 534 U. S. 161 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
able injury but the just and reasonable character of the requirements . . . .'" Mullane, supra, at 315.
Nor does the Due Process Clause require the Government to substitute the procedures proposed by petitioner for those in place at FCI Milan in 1988. See Brief for Petitioner 17 (suggesting that the Government could send the notice to a prison official with a request that a prison employee watch the prisoner open the notice, cosign a receipt, and mail the signed paper back to the agency from which it came). The suggested procedures would work primarily to bolster the Government's ability to establish that the prisoner actually received notice of the forfeiture, a problem petitioner perceives to be the FCI Milan's procedures' primary defect. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 15 (explaining that the problem is that "[t]he procedure doesn't require verification of delivery"). But as we have noted above, our cases have never required actual notice. The facts of the present case, moreover, illustrate the difficulty with such a requirement. The letter in question was sent to petitioner in 1988, but the claim of improper notice was first asserted in 1993. What might be reasonably fresh in the minds of all parties had the question arisen contemporaneously will surely be stale five years later. The issue would often turn on disputed testimony as to whether the letter was in fact delivered to petitioner. The title to property should not depend on such vagaries.
Justice Ginsburg's dissent does not contend, as petitioner does, that due process could be satisfied in this case only with actual notice. It makes an alternative argument that the FBI's notice was constitutionally flawed because it was " 'substantially less likely to bring home notice' than a feasible substitute," post, at 174 (quoting Mullane, supra, at 314-315)—namely, the methods used currently by the BOP, which generally require an inmate to sign a logbook acknowledging delivery, see post, at 180, 181-182 (describing current BOP procedures and noting the practicability of BOP Unit Team member's "linger[ing]" a little longer to secure an in-
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