The Supreme Court’s Tolerance Will Be Tested by Alaska Beer Confiscation Case
Slate · L · trust 29/100
The state of Alaska has spent the past 14 years trying to confiscate an 82-year-old bush pilot’s $95,000 airplane because a passenger packed a six-pack of Budweiser with her groceries.
That sentence is not a simplification. It is the whole case. And last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear it, which means the justices will finally have to answer a question they have been dodging for decades: Does the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines actually stop the government from taking anything?
It began on April 3, 2012, an ordinary morning for Ken Jouppi, who had spent decades flying people, mail, and groceries across the Alaskan interior. He was scheduled to carry a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, a predominantly Alaska Native village of fewer than 100 people about 110 miles north of the city, reachable only by air or river. Packed among the passenger’s supplies were three cases of beer, a gift for her husband, Beaver’s postmaster. The village had voted itself dry in 2004, as Alaska’s local option law lets rural communities do; the beer was contraband. State troopers searched the plane before takeoff and found the beer. Jouppi swore he had no idea; bush pilots do not rummage through their passengers’ bags. A jury convicted him of a misdemeanor anyway, on the theory that a single six-pack sat in plain view, and a judge gave him the statutory minimum: a $1,500 fine and three days in jail.
That should have been the end of it. Instead, Alaska went after the plane, a 1969 Cessna that was the entire working capital of Jouppi’s one-man air-taxi service. The forfeiture fight outlasted his flying career, and last year it produced the ruling the Supreme Court will now review. Alcohol abuse devastates rural Alaska, the state’s highest court reasoned, fueling crime, disease, and death, and against that backdrop, the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes “grave societal harm.” Weighed against harm that grave, an airplane is apparently a bargain.
To understand how a court talks itself into that, you have to appreciate how little law there is to stop it. The excessive-fines clause is the neglected middle child of the Eighth Amendment, wedged between excessive bail and cruel and unusual punishment, and almost never litigated. In more than two centuries, the Supreme Court has found a fine unconstitutionally excessive exactly once. That was United States v. Bajakajian in 1998, in which the government tried to keep $357,144 from a man whose entire crime was failing to declare his own lawful cash at the airport, and the court held the forfeiture “grossly disproportional” to the offense. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, announcing a standard but not a method; the court has spent the quarter-century since declining to supply one.
Timbs v. Indiana in 2019 could have been the breakthrough. Tyson Timbs sold a small quantity of drugs to undercover officers, an offense with a maximum fine of $10,000, and Indiana answered by seizing his $42,000 Land Rover. In 2019, a unanimous court, in one of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s last major opinions, held that the ban on excessive fines binds the states, tracing it from the Magna Carta forward as a bulwark against governments that use fines to raise revenue and punish enemies. Then the court remanded without saying what the word excessive means. The sequel tells you what that omission was worth: It was 2021, nearly a decade after the seizure, before Indiana finally gave up on keeping Timbs’ car. Winning the landmark case was not enough. Every state court in America was told that the clause applies to them, and not one was told how to apply it. Jouppi v. Alaska grew in that vacuum.
The case turns on a sleight of hand, and once you see it, you’ll spot it everywhere. There are two ways to measure the gravity of an offense. You can ask what this defendant actually did. On that measure, Jouppi’s case weighs nothing: a misdemeanor, a minimum sentence, one six-pack, no profit, no smuggling enterprise, and a record on which the state never proved he knew about the rest of the beer. Or you can ask how serious the category of crime is as a matter of social policy. Alaska chose the latter. Alcohol has genuinely ravaged rural Alaska, and the local-option law reflects a real exercise of village self-determination; none of that is in dispute. What the court did with it is. It stacked the entire accumulated tragedy of alcohol abuse on one side of the scale, set one man’s airplane on the other, and announced that the scale balanced.
The trick works on anything. Every criminal statute targets some category of conduct that causes grave harm in the aggregate. Speeding kills tens of thousands of Americans a year, so forfeit the car of a driver doing 40 in a 25. Tax evasion costs the Treasury Department billions of dollars, so take the house of the filer who padded a deduction. Measure gravity by the statute’s subject matter rather than the defendant’s conduct and proportionality review approves everything. The clause survives as decoration: incorporated, venerated, and incapable of stopping a single seizure.
That should alarm you even if you never fly beer to a dry village, because forfeiture in America is not a procedural backwater. It is a business model. Federal forfeiture funds have taken close to $60 billion since 2000, state and local agencies routinely keep some or all of what they seize, and the incentive to police for profit has been documented for decades, much of it by the Institute for Justice, the public interest firm now representing Jouppi for free. And the typical target looks nothing like a pilot with a Cessna. In states that publish the data, the median seizure runs to a few thousand dollars or less, taken in traffic stops from poor people and, studies suggest, disproportionately from Black and Latino drivers, owners who will never be charged and cannot afford the lawyer it would take to object. Jouppi’s case involves criminal…
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