Yesterday, the Supreme Court agreed to take an extremely Alaskan case that reads like something out of Smokey and the Bandit. As Amy Howe at SCOTUSBlog explains:
The justices agreed to review Jouppi v. Alaska, an Alaskan bush pilot’s challenge to the forfeiture of his $95,000 airplane — which prosecutors sought on the theory that he must have known that one of his passengers was bringing a six-pack of beer into an Alaskan village where alcohol is prohibited. That forfeiture, pilot Ken Jouppi contends, violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines…
The case now before the court began more than 14 years ago, when Jouppi was scheduled to fly a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, Alaska — approximately a one-hour flight. Before Jouppi took off, state troopers arrived at the airport, searched his plane, found the beer that the passenger was bringing to her husband in Beaver, and charged both the passenger and Jouppi (as well as his company) with knowingly bringing alcohol to a “dry” village. Jouppi was found guilty. The trial judge sentenced him to three days in prison and ordered him to pay a fine of $1,500. The state also sought to forfeit Jouppi’s plane.
The Court ducked any serious examination of the Excessive Fines Clause this term in Pung v. Isabella County, Michigan, in which the claim of an excessive fine in the sale of a house to satisfy a tax bill was a secondary element of a challenge to the method by which the state sold the property. This, by contrast, is a straightforward attack on forfeiture as an excessive fine. It could turn out to be one of the big cases of the next term.