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TAKEN explored the roots of civil asset forfeiture in South Carolina and how law enforcement and prosecutors abused a broken system to seize millions of dollars in cash and property from citizens, sometimes never charging or convicting individuals with a related crime. To show this, the team of reporters crisscrossed the state to seek records from each county courthouse (many didn’t put them in online public indexes) and built a first-of-its-kind database of forfeiture cases.