The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from an 82-year-old Alaskan bush pilot whose aircraft was seized following a misdemeanor alcohol conviction.
Kenneth Jouppi was operating a one-man air taxi service in 2012 when Alaska state troopers executed a search warrant on his plane at a Fairbanks runway.
Troopers discovered three cases of beer on board — two Budweiser and one Bud Light — belonging to a passenger travelling to the remote village of Beaver to celebrate her birthday.
Beaver had banned the possession and sale of alcohol within its limits, making Jouppi’s transport of the beer a criminal offence under Alaska’s alcohol importation laws.
Jouppi said he had no knowledge the beer was on board, but troopers maintained that at least one six-pack was visibly sticking out of a shopping bag.
One trooper stated that Jouppi would “have to be blind” not to have seen at least some of the alcohol, and that “pilots with that bad of eyesight just don’t fly.”
He was convicted of alcohol importation, a misdemeanor, and sentenced to 180 days in jail with 177 suspended, along with a partially suspended $3,000 fine and three years of probation.
The state also moved to seize his 1969 Cessna aircraft through civil asset forfeiture, treating the plane as an instrument of the crime — a penalty effectively equivalent to a $95,000 fine.
The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that the seizure was not an excessive fine, with justices writing that the harm caused by alcohol in rural Alaska justified severe punishment.
The U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case, known as Jouppi v. Alaska, through an unsigned order with no dissenting justices and no explanation for its decision to hear the appeal.
Jouppi argues the forfeiture of his Cessna violates the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause, and the Institute for Justice is representing him before the court.
“The Excessive Fines Clause of the Constitution was built for cases like this,” said Sam Gedge, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, which is representing the pilot.
“As government agencies increasingly exploit fines and forfeitures to pad their budgets, it’s vital that the Supreme Court make clear that the Excessive Fines Clause is a meaningful check on government overreach,” Gedge added.
Alaska argues that confiscating aircraft used to facilitate illegal imports is the only practical way to prevent the serious problems caused by alcoholism in its remote communities.
The state is defending the existing interpretation of the clause, which holds that “judgments about the appropriate punishment for an offense belong in the first instance to the legislature.”