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The Supreme Court will soon hear oral arguments in an Alaska case involving a plane, a six-pack of beer and a Constitutional amendment that traces its history back centuries as a legal expert lays out the ruling’s potential impact to Fox News Digital.
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted,” reads the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The amendment is at the heart of a case that will be heard by the Supreme Court in December, and Cully Stimson, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, described it as “the case that libertarians and liberty-minded people have been hoping for for years.”
Kenneth Jouppi, now 82, was operating a one-man air taxi service using his 1969 Cessna plane he owned in 2012 when Alaska State Troopers executed a search warrant on his plane and found alcohol on board, including a six-pack that they said was clearly visible. At the time, Jouppi was at a trail in Fairbanks and preparing to take a client and her shopping to the isolated village of Beaver, near the center of the state.
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The Institute for Justice is helping Kenneth Jouppi file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court. (Kenneth Jouppi/Institute for Justice)
Having beer on board was not illegal in itself and Jouppi said he did not know the woman had the beer with her. However, because Beaver had prohibited the possession or sale of alcohol within its boundaries, Jouppi was convicted of importing alcohol, a misdemeanor. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled that under the alcohol importation ban, the state was required to confiscate Jouppi’s Cessna.
Jouppi has since argued in court that the state’s seizure of his plane, worth $95,000, violated the 8th Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. Now the Supreme Court will determine whether he is right.
“Taking a guy’s plane for a living because he tried to take a six-pack of beer into a dry village, I mean, can there be a more outrageous abuse of the excessive fines clause?” Stimson said. “I don’t think so. So honestly, in a perfect world, it should be 9-0 for Mr. Jouppi.”
Stimson says the idea that governments should not be able to devastate citizens with fines dates back centuries to Magna Carta, the 1215 English charter that limited the power of the king and established the principle that rulers are subject to the law, and explained in a recent Daily Signal article that the ban on excessive fines is supported by “8 centuries of proportionality.”
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At the center of the case, Stimson said, is whether Alaska’s confiscation of Jouppi’s roughly $95,000 plane was proportionate to his misdemeanor conviction for bringing a six-pack of beer to a barren village.
Alaska says the plane was worth less than 10 times the maximum possible fine of $10,000, while Jouppi’s lawyers point to the punishment he actually received: the minimum fine of $1,500 and three days in jail. The Supreme Court will consider whether proportionality should be measured against the maximum sentence permitted by law or the specific sentence imposed in Jouppi’s case.
“The Alaska brief spends a lot of ink on the purpose of these local rules that create dry towns,” Stimson said. “They’re spending a lot of ink on alcoholism in Alaska and everything else. All of that doesn’t matter. If it was that important, they would have made it a felony and they would have made it a very serious felony with a lot of jail time and a huge forfeiture. They made it a misdemeanor. He was convicted of a misdemeanor and he got three days in jail.”
Stimson pointed the finger at the trial judge who refused to take Jouppi’s plane in the first place and said it was the right decision.
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Alaska bush pilot Kenneth Jouppi is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court after the state seized his plane worth $95,000 for unknowingly transporting beer to a dry village. (Kenneth Jouppi/Institute for Justice)
“The state appealed, it came back before the judge on remand from the Court of Appeals and the judge said, I find the state’s request to be a violation of the excessive fines clause of the Eighth Amendment,” Stimson said.
“The state appealed again. They went to the Court of Appeals and then to the Alaska Supreme Court,” Stimson said. “So even the trial judge, when he had two bites of the apple, refused to get on the plane and I think you really have to give credit to that trial judge, who was in the courtroom, who understood that this was a man who was almost 90 years old, who was an Air Force veteran, whose only job and means of income, outside of Social Security, was basically flying this plane to villages as a driver And so if the government can do it, the state or the federal government can take away your livelihood for a period of time, we’re in real trouble as a country.”
In ruling in Jouppi’s case, the court will have the opportunity to seriously restrict the ability of state and local governments to impose asset forfeiture, a long-standing goal of civil liberties advocates that has been a problem for decades in the United States as Americans have pushed back against excessive fines and seizures by government agencies.
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Stimson told Fox News Digital that the Supreme Court has only ruled on the excessive fines clause five times and has “never really defined exactly what constitutes an excessive fine.” He touted the significance the ruling could have and highlighted the amicus brief in the case filed by the Buckeye Institute in Ohio as something that “really stood out to me.”
“They’re talking about all the incentives built into the system that can be and are abused by law enforcement when they arrest you for this crime and they take everything that’s yours here, or they arrest you for this tiny little crime and then they take this,” Stimson said. “And of course, when they accept it, the proceeds of that benefit law enforcement and go to pay for their additional weapons, their cars, their new buildings, their uniforms and the rest. So the incentives are misaligned. And so I think the court will hopefully, first of all, just for legal nerds like me, answer what are the parameters for evaluating requests for excessive fines under the Eighth Amendment. But secondly, write it in a way that deters law enforcement abusing the authority they currently enjoy.
Robert Schmad of Fox News Digital contributed to this report
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