Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case of Alaska Pilot Whose $95,000 Plane Was Seized Over a 6-Pack of Beer

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to consider an Alaska pilot’s challenge to the government seizure of his airplane for transporting an illicit six-pack of beer.

In an orders list, the Court granted the petition of Ken Jouppi, a retired 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot who argues that the seizure of his $95,000 Cessna U206D is an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment.

Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2012 when Alaska state troopers searched his plane before takeoff and discovered that a passenger was attempting to bring several cases of beer to a “dry” village where alcohol is prohibited. (Jouppi was only culpable for a single six-pack of Budweiser that troopers said was in plain sight.)

And for the last 14 years, Jouppi has fought to stop the Alaska state government from taking his Cessna through asset forfeiture, a process which allows police and prosecutors to seize property connected to criminal activity.

The Alaska Supreme Court ruled against Jouppi last year, leading to his Supreme Court petition. Jouppi is represented by the Institute for Justice, a public-interest law firm.

“I’m thrilled that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear this case, because this case isn’t just about me or my airplane anymore,” Jouppi said in an Institute for Justice press release. “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.”

For the Institute for Justice, Jouppi’s case is also an opportunity to build on a landmark 2019 Supreme Court ruling that held that the Eighth Amendment applied to states. Specifically, Jouppi’s case asks the Supreme Court to rule on whether states should consider the gravity of a defendant’s specific offense, rather than take an abstract view of the general crime.

“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, in the press release. “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. We’re confident that it will do so here.”

In 2019, the Supreme Court ruled in response to an Institute for Justice lawsuit that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive fines and fees applies to states under the incorporation doctrine. In the underlying case, Indiana police had seized a Land Rover from a man named Tyson Timbs for a minor drug crime.

But while the Supreme Court ruled that states are bound by the Eighth Amendment, the justices left it up to state courts to determine what constitutes an excessive fine.

Many states adopted proportionality tests that involve some analysis of personal culpability. In 2021, for example, the Indiana Supreme Court rejected prosecutors’ arguments that there should be no proportionality limit on seizures in drug cases like Timbs’, and it ordered Timbs’ car to be returned to him after eight years in legal limbo.

However, other courts, such as the Alaska Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, have focused instead on the maximum penalties for worst-case offenders and more abstract social ills that the criminal statutes in question sought to address.

Under that logic, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the forfeiture of Jouppi’s plane was not excessive.

“Alcohol abuse in rural Alaska leads to increased crime; disorders, such as alcoholism; conditions, such as fetal alcohol spectrum disorder; and death, imposing substantial costs on public health and the administration of justice. Within this context, it is clear that the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes grave societal harm,” the ruling states. “This factor strongly suggests that the forfeiture is not grossly disproportional.”

The Institute for Justice argued in Jouppi’s petition to the Supreme Court that this interpretation is contrary to the historical understanding of the Excessive Fines Clause, and that the question of proportionality “implicates the Constitution’s most textually explicit check on extravagant economic sanctions—including both civil and criminal forfeitures.”