[jlujan]

The supporting argument is that, if proven guilty, there might not be enough assets left over to compensate victims. Also, in some cases to prevent the alleged perpetrator form fleeing. The problem is scenarios as described in the article. The issues that I see in this is a)that funds unrelated to any crime are frozen/held and b)there is no recourse when proven innocent. There almost needs to be some mechanism to hold funds while leveraging them for defense, in the similar way to a bail bond. As far as rich mobsters, having prosecutors resorting to vague statutes of unrelated crimes (wire fraud instead of murder) is indicative of a larger issue with the criminal justice system (as well as many other scenarios in comments here.) Creating obscure, vague, all encompassing statues to snare criminals, and ever more frequently, the ignorent and unwary white-collar, is not representative of an effective and fair social justice system.