For Cases of Beer, the Plane Was Seized

An Alaskan bush pilot asks for help from the Supreme Court.

For want of a shoe the horse was lost, but can cases of beer cause you to lose your plane? That’s what happened to Ken Jouppi, an Alaskan pilot who made his living flying passengers to remote villages.

For Cases of Beer, the Plane Was Seized

In April 2012, Mr. Jouppi agreed to fly a passenger from Fairbanks, where she had bought a load of groceries, to her home in Beaver fewer than 200 miles away. Since 2004 the village of Beaver has banned alcohol, a “local option” Alaska extends to villages that want to control the import or possession of alcohol.

Mr. Jouppi’s passenger had packed the beer into bags loaded onto Mr. Jouppi’s plane to surprise her husband, the local postmaster, for his birthday. State troopers searched the plane before it took off, seized the beer and gave Mr. Jouppi three days in jail and a $1,500 fine for the misdemeanor offense. The trial court said forfeiture of the plane wasn’t necessary since the flight never left Fairbanks and never delivered the alcohol that would have violated the town’s rule.

The government appealed, and a state appeals court and the State Supreme Court both ruled in favor of forfeiture. Mr. Jouppi is now appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, and he has a good constitutional case.

The Eighth Amendment says the government may not inflict excessive fines or punishments. In U.S. v. Bajakajian (1998), the Supreme Court ruled that constitutional inquiry about fines needed to focus on proportionality. That means the “amount of the forfeiture must bear some relationship to the gravity of the offense that it is designed to punish.”

In Timbs v. Indiana (2019), the Justices ruled unanimously that the Eighth Amendment also applies to the states, noting that the states “increasingly depend heavily on fines and fees as a source of general revenue.”

Alcohol abuse is a problem in rural Alaska, but so is the state’s habit of grabbing personal property in civil forfeitures. Between 75% and 100% of forfeiture proceeds go to law enforcement in Alaska, according to the Institute for Justice, which represents Mr. Jouppi. Alaska earned a D+ in IJ’s most recent state-by-state Policing for Profit report.

Asset forfeitures are a perennial problem because law enforcement has a financial incentive for the seizures. But the Justices can do a service to citizens by taking the Alaska case and making clear when a seizure is excessive and violates the Eighth Amendment.