This coming Fall the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that had its origins in my old home, the land of the midnight sun, called Jouppi v. State of Alaska. In that case, Alaska took a bush pilot’s $95,000 airplane by criminal forfeiture because he was preparing to fly a passenger who, unknown to him, had packed beer into her luggage, including one six-pack of Budweiser that arguably could be seen inside a shopping bag. Despite my affinity for Alaska and my prior service as the state’s Attorney General, I predict that Alaska will lose this case. Taking a $95,000 airplane for unknowingly preparing to fly a passenger with a six-pack of beer is an excessive fine that violates the Eighth Amendment.
Ken Jouppi is an Alaskan’s Alaskan. He started in the Air Force where he worked as a mechanic on B-52 bombers, became fascinated with flying, obtained his pilot’s license, and moved to the land of pilots’ dreams, Alaska. After flying as an employee for others from one end of the North Star state to the other, Jouppi eventually started his own air charter service and purchased his own airplane, a 1969 Cessna worth about $95,000. The criminal case started when Jouppi was in Fairbanks preparing to carry a repeat passenger to the small bush village of Beaver on the north bank of the Yukon River. Beaver is a fully “dry” village that bans selling, importing, and possessing alcohol.
As Jouppi was loading his plane, Alaska State Troopers suddenly arrived and searched his plane along with his passenger’s luggage. Unknown to Jouppi, along with many other groceries the passenger had three cases of beer packed in her luggage. She herself was not a drinker. But she was travelling to Beaver to spend her birthday with her husband, who worked there; the beer (Budweiser and Bud Light) was for her husband. The Troopers maintained that one six-pack of Budweiser was visible in a shopping bag. Accordingly, the State charged Jouppi, his company, and the passenger with the misdemeanor offense of knowingly transporting an alcoholic beverage into a dry community. After being convicted of a misdemeanor at trial, the judge imposed on Jouppi the minimum sentence allowed: a $1,500 fine (and another $1,500 for his company) and three days’ imprisonment.
Then the unconstitutional forfeiture came into play. Alaska instituted an in personam criminal forfeiture proceeding to confiscate Jouppi’s $95,000 airplane because he had prepared (allegedly knowingly) to fly an $8.34 six-pack of beer into Beaver. Mind you Jouppi never transported anything because he never even took off with the passenger and her beer—the Troopers arrived as he was loading his plane on the ground in Fairbanks. Despite Jouppi’s clean criminal record (at 70 plus years of age), the lack of any evidence that he had ever engaged in similar conduct, his relatively minor misdemeanor offense, his minimum fine and sentence, and the relatively harmlessness of bringing one six-pack of beer to a passenger’s husband for personal consumption, the Alaska Supreme Court approved the taking of Jouppi’s airplane.
How did the Alaska Court justify such an obviously heavy-handed punishment? Well, the way the Alaska Supreme Court has often done in past cases, by focusing not on the specific facts of the case at hand (i.e., Jouppi’s specific individual conduct) but instead on overall abstract societal harms—in this case the harms caused by alcohol in general on society and Alaska’s Bush villages. To rationalize its approval of the State’s confiscating Jouppi’s $95,000 airplane over an $8.34 six-pack of beer the Court looked, not to the specific minimal harm (if any) caused by Jouppi, but instead to “the harm…addressed in the legislative history of the forfeiture [statute]” the legislature had enacted decades earlier. In that abstract analysis, the Court laid squarely on Jouppi’s shoulders all of the ills of alcohol abuse statewide: “increased crime,” “alcoholism,” “fetal alcohol spectrum disorder,” “substantial costs on public health and the administration of justice,” and “death.” “It is clear to us,” the Alaska Court stated, “that the legislature determined that the harm from even a six-pack of beer knowingly imported into a dry village is severe enough to warrant forfeiture of an aircraft.” Good Lord! With that reasoning it’s a wonder they didn’t take his home, empty his bank accounts, and order him flogged with a cat of nine tails.
What is particularly wrong with the Alaska Court’s decision is the Court’s refusal to follow clear U.S. Supreme Court precedent—precedent that is followed by multiple federal circuit courts (including the Ninth Circuit) and other state supreme courts. Under the High Court’s Eighth Amendment “Excessive Fine’s” precedent, Alaska’s Court was not permitted to justify the confiscation of Jouppi’s airplane by generalizing and analyzing abstract societal harms from alcohol at a stratospheric level but instead was required to reflect on Jouppi’s specific individual conduct. As the Ninth Circuit has held, “[i]t is critical . . . that the court review the specific actions of the violator rather than by taking an abstract view of the violation.” And further, “[t]he culpability of the offender should be examined specifically, rather than examining the gravity of the crime in the abstract.” The Alaska Court ignored all of this precedent and went to the stratospheric heights of the abstract.
Under correct and controlling Eighth Amendment analysis, the Supreme Court in a case called Timbs v. Indiana found that the state’s confiscation of a man’s $42,000 Land Rover over a low-level drug infraction for which he received a modest sentence: home detention, probation, and addiction treatment, was an unconstitutional excessive fine. The Supreme Court did not permit Indiana to lay on Mr. Timb’s shoulders the entire weight of societal harms stemming from illegal drug use. Under correct and controlling Eighth Amendment analysis in an earlier case called United States v. Bajakajian, the High Court held that the federal government’s confiscation of $357,144 in cash from Mr. Bajakajian for simply innocently failing to report it when he entered the country, was an unconstitutional excessive fine. Despite the fact that currency-reporting crimes might generally include serious violations by tax evaders, drug kingpins, or money launderers, the Court did not permit the government to impute to Mr. Bajakajian the offenses of others but rather required it to consider only what specific harms his specific acts had caused.
In Timbs and Bajakajian the Supreme Court held that under the Eight Amendment’s Excessive Fine’s Clause a court’s analysis must be narrow and specific. The standard mandated by the Supreme Court requires courts to look at “the specific actions of the violator rather than. . .taking an abstract view of the violation.” Courts cannot, as the Alaska Court did, justify an enormous fine by imputing to the defendant “the offenses of others,” but rather must consider what specific harms his specific acts had caused. Under controlling Eighth Amendment precedent, the excessiveness standard is “defendant-culpability focused, rather than centered on the severity of the crime in the abstract.” If the Alaska Court had correctly followed U.S. Supreme Court precedent there was no way that it could have approved letting the State take Jouppi’s $95,000 airplane for at most negligently not stopping his passenger from packing a $8.34 six-pack of beer into her luggage.
It is very early in the Jouppi case. The Supreme Court only just granted certiorari on July 20, 2026, and not a single brief has yet been filed by any party. The case will not be argued to the Justices until sometime this coming Fall or Winter or perhaps next Spring. But I think the writing is already on the wall in this case. I predict that the High Court will rule against Alaska and reverse the Alaska Supreme Court in favor of Mr. Jouppi.
In this case, you know an excessive fine when you see it, and Alaska imposed an excessive fine on Mr. Jouppi. Give him back his airplane and let him fly Alaska’s skies in peace.
Thanks for reading.
K. C. Gilbert