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The Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck a blow for constitutional rights recently, when it issued a ruling that should curtail use of the commonwealth’s poorly-written civil asset forfeiture statute.

That’s the means by which law enforcement officials seize property — from cash to entire homes — from people linked to illegal activity.

On paper it might sound legitimate, but it practice the seizures often fly in the face of citizens’ Fourth Amendment protections. Prosecutors only had to prove it was more likely than not that a person was aware of or consented to illegal activity to confiscate their property.

That’s a ridiculous standard the high court struck down, ruling that prosecutors must now prove someone did in fact both know of and consent to illegal activity before seizing their property. The court also ruled, correctly, that law enforcement can’t just take anything and everything: the assets seized have to be proportional to the crime committed.

It’s good to see the court moving to protect the rights of Pennsylvanians and limit abuses of this statute. But the true remedy to this problem is ensuring no one’s property can be seized at all before they are convicted of a crime.

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Thirteen every day. That’s the number of Pennsylvanians who died last year of a drug overdose — a horrendous 37 percent increase in the number of overdose deaths from 2015, according to information released by the Drug Enforcement Agency on Thursday.

The figures represent a record high in the state’s ongoing opioid addiction and overdose crisis, which in turn is a major driver of a nationwide increase in the death rates for people in the prime of their lives — ages 25 to 44. White Americans, for which the “prime years” death rate has risen 12 percent since the beginning of the decade, are among the hardest-hit by this phenomenon, but it has not spared any ethnicity or race.

The full report detailing Pennsylvania’s death toll in this crisis is due later this month. We expect it to be yet another chilling reminder that there is no end in sight to this public health crisis.

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The specifics of their sentences aside, it’s encouraging to see three former Penn State University administrators — president Graham Spanier, athletic director Tim Curley, and Vice President Gary Schultz — ordered to serve time behind bars for their roles in abetting Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of children.

What these men did — agreeing in 2001 that they would not report what an assistant coach told them to law enforcement — enabled Sandusky to continue his pattern of abuse and inflict physical and emotional suffering on multiple victims.

They deserve every moment behind bars that they received, and we hope they will be forced to serve out their sentences in full. One day they will walk out of their prison, while the children they failed to protect will never be free from the horror and pain of Sandusky’s abuse.