Ken Jouppi, a bush pilot, was putting gas in his Cessna in Fairbanks, Alaska, on an April morning in 2012 when state troopers arrived. He was preparing to fly a client to Beaver, a remote village 110 miles to the north that prohibits alcohol.
“It was going to be a good day,” Mr. Jouppi, an 82-year-old Air Force veteran, recalled last week.
But the encounter ended badly. The troopers found beer in the passenger’s luggage, and Mr. Jouppi was eventually found guilty of knowingly transporting alcohol into a dry community. He was sentenced to three days in jail and ordered to pay a $1,500 fine.
Prosecutors wanted one more thing: his plane, worth about $95,000. Because Mr. Jouppi had used it to commit his crime, they argued, it was subject to forfeiture. The Alaska Supreme Court agreed.
“He knowingly transported a six-pack of alcohol in plain view while acting in his professional capacity as the operator of an air taxi company and the pilot of the airplane,” Justice Jude Pate wrote for a unanimous court. “This factor suggests that the forfeiture of his airplane is not grossly disproportional.”
Mr. Jouppi, represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal group, asked the U.S. Supreme Court last month to hear his appeal. Although the case seems to present a substantial question in an area that has lately engaged the justices, the state waived its right to file a response.
In a sign that at least one justice is intrigued by the case, the court asked Alaska to file a brief. On Friday, its lawyers asked for an extension, saying they hoped to submit their response in November.
Justices across the ideological spectrum have been troubled by government seizures of private property used to commit crimes.
“Forfeiture has in recent decades become widespread and highly profitable,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in 2017. “And because the law enforcement entity responsible for seizing the property often keeps it, these entities have strong incentives to pursue forfeiture.”
Mr. Jouppi said that was true in his state. “In Alaska, they like to seize stuff,” he said. “They have a whole air force of seized planes for various violations.”
Donald Soderstrom, a lawyer for the state, said taking Mr. Jouppi’s plane was a fitting response to his crime.
“For years, alcohol has had a devastating impact on Alaska, especially rural Alaska,” Mr. Soderstrom said last year when he argued before the State Supreme Court. “Many of the communities that have chosen to prohibit alcohol lack law enforcement. They lack medical resources. Many of them are off the road system, and they are reachable primarily by air.”
“This is why,” he said, “forfeiture of an airplane used to import alcohol to those communities is reasonable.”
Mr. Jouppi’s passenger was planning to visit her husband, who worked in Beaver. Her luggage included three cases of beer, a mix of Budweiser and Bud Light.
The beer never made it to Beaver, and what Mr. Jouppi saw or knew about it is disputed. But a jury found him guilty, and courts have assumed that he must have seen a six-pack of beer in one of the passenger’s shopping bags.
Mr. Jouppi said that he saw the tops of cans, but it did not occur to him that they might contain beer. The passenger, he said, did not drink.
In 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution places limits on the ability of states and localities to take and keep cash, cars, houses and other private property used to commit crimes.
That case involved Tyson Timbs, a small-time drug offender in Indiana who pleaded guilty to selling $225 of heroin to undercover police officers. He was sentenced to one year of house arrest and was ordered to pay $1,200 in fees and fines.
State officials also seized Mr. Timbs’s $42,000 Land Rover, saying he had used it to commit crimes.
The Supreme Court unanimously ruled for Mr. Timbs. The decision was modest, saying only that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines applied both to the federal government and to the states. It did not rule on whether the forfeiture itself was lawful.
But Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, noted the danger of empowering the government to seize private property. “Excessive fines,” she wrote, “can be used, for example, to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies.”
When Mr. Timbs’s case made its way back to the Indiana Supreme Court in 2021, it ruled that he could keep his Range Rover. Seizing the vehicle, the court wrote, “was highly punitive and thus overly harsh.”
The Alaska Supreme Court took a different approach, focusing on the maximum fine for Mr. Jouppi’s crime — $10,000 — rather than the one actually imposed on him. A ratio of nine and a half to one, the court said, was acceptable.
Mr. Jouppi said he remained hopeful.
“As miserable as this whole thing has been,” he said, “I’m glad that it came to the point where it is now, because we do have a chance in the Supreme Court. It’s not only my right to fight this, but it’s my duty, too, to see this through.”