(CNN) — The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear an appeal from an Alaskan bush pilot whose plane was seized by authorities after they discovered it was bound for a remote, dry village with beer on board.
The appeal from the 82-year-old pilot, Kenneth Jouppi, could have national implications if the 6-3 conservative court limits the ability of state and local governments to rely on asset forfeiture. Jouppi claims that the taking of his $95,000 Cessna for what amounted to a six-pack of beer violated the 8th Amendment’s bar on excessive fines.
The Supreme Court is likely to hear oral arguments in the case later this year or early next — and hand down a decision by next summer.
“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which is representing the pilot. “As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach.”
“I’m in my 80s now, and I’ve been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach,” Jouppi said in a news release.
Jouppi says that the Budweiser and Bud Light found on his plane, which was packaged with other groceries, belonged to a passenger. He said that most of it was out of sight, but state police said one six-pack was in plain view inside a grocery bag. One trooper claimed that Jouppi would “have to be blind” not to have seen at least some of the alcohol and that “pilots with that bad of eyesight just don’t fly.”
Alaska told the Supreme Court that officials face “unique difficulties in combating alcohol abuse and its consequences” in remote parts of the state. The village at issue, Beaver, is home to fewer than 100 people and is “off the road system.” The community banned the sale and possession of alcohol more than two decades ago.
“Given that many communities are accessible primarily by air, the legislature provided that any airplane used to illegally import alcohol into a dry community was subject to forfeiture,” the state told the Supreme Court.
Jouppi was convicted of alcohol importation, a misdemeanor. State police executed a search warrant on his plane in Fairbanks before it was to take off for Beaver.
Jouppi argues that under the 8th Amendment’s bar on excessive fines, courts must consider the “gravity of the specific defendant’s wrongdoing.” In his case, he said, that didn’t happen and his “airplane [was] forfeited for a six-pack.”
The Supreme Court has had a number of opportunities in recent years to consider questions about what constitutes an excessive fine but has resolved those appeals on narrower grounds.
In late June, a unanimous court allowed a Michigan family to continue fighting a county’s decision to sell its home for $76,008 at public auction even though the property was assessed at more than $194,000. But that decision skirted the broader constitutional questions the case had raised about excessive fines.
Critics, including the libertarian Cato Institute, hope the court will use the case to limit what it has described as abuses of forfeiture laws.
“Billions of dollars have been generated for the government through civil and criminal forfeitures,” the group told the Supreme Court in a brief last year. “And because it is expensive and time-consuming for defendants to challenge forfeitures in court, successfully asserting Eighth Amendment rights is difficult.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
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