It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry at the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision on March 4 upholding the state of Michigan’s forfeiture of Tina Bennis’ half-interest in a family car.

Her offense was… well, nothing. Her husband was the offender. He had been caught in their car receiving oral sex from a prostitute, while parked on a Detroit street after ending his shift at a steel mill. Mrs. Bennis had been at home, wondering where he was, calling the missing persons bureau.

The Court did not hold that Mrs. Bennis had reason to know of her husband’s sordid little tryst. Nor did it rely on Solicitor General Drew Days III’s incredibly lame assertion (in an amicus brief) that Mrs. Bennis had not done enough to prevent her husband from using their car to betray her. Nor did it question her claim that she had recently paid for most of the $600 car with her own hard-earned money from baby-sitting and other chores.

Rather, the Court held in Bennis v. Michigan that none of this mattered. The state not only could confiscate and sell the car (as Mrs. Bennis conceded), but could use the proceeds of her $300 share to pay its costs and keep any money that might be left over. All this, done under the authority of a state nuisance statute aimed at purging neighborhoods of prostitution, was consistent with due process of law.

This result was dictated, Chief Justice William Rehnquist held for the majority, by some precedents dating back to the era of pirate ships and privateers. Widely regarded (at least until Bennis) as having been undermined by more recent decisions, those anachronistic precedents allow governments to forfeit the interests of innocent owners of properties used for illegal purposes, based on the outmoded legal Fiction that the property is somehow the guilty party.

For the jury, it was a close call whether to find Rene Rodriguez guilty of selling any marijuana at all.

On the third day of deliberations, the jurors told the judge that they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. But finally, after being given an Allen charge, they brought in a conspiracy conviction. It was apparently based on prosecution evidence implicating Rodriguez in a 10-ounce marijuana sale, together with the judge’s instruction that all the jury had to find to convict was that Rodriguez had conspired to sell a "measurable" amount.

The sentence: life without parole.

How’s that? Rodriguez would have faced only 18 months in prison, increased to 4 1/2 years by his two prior drug convictions, if his sentence had been based on the 10-ounce sale that was proven beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

What jacked his sentence up to life without parole, under as-early "three strikes and-you’re out" statute enacted by Congress, was a finding by the judge, at the post-verdict sentencing hearing, that Rodriguez had probably conspired to sell more than 1,000 kilograms of marijuana, not just 10 ounces.

He probably had. But the judge, Thomas Curran of the U.S. District Court in Milwaukee, did not suggest that this had been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, or even by clear and convincing evidence. Nor did the prosecution claim to have that kind of proof.

Rather, under the current federal sentencing regime, the prosecution had to prove only that it was more probable than not that Rodriguez had sold 1,000 kilograms, in order to condemn him to die in prison.