Jouppi v. Alaska
Brief Details
- Case No.: 25-246
- Brief Filed: September 10, 2026
- Jurisdiction: United States Supreme Court
Key Topics in the Brief
Briefs
The question presented is whether the Excessive Fines Clause permits a court to uphold the forfeiture of a defendant’s property by measuring the gravity of a broad class of offenses and the associated social harms. It does not. The Clause requires courts to conduct a proportionality inquiry anchored in the defendant’s actual conduct, personal culpability, and actual or intended harm. See United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321, 334, 338–39 (1998); Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. 146, 151–53 (2019). Courts may not substitute an abstract assessment of the generalized social harms associated with other commissions of the statutory offense. Ken Jouppi’s case exemplifies the point. Jouppi, a pilot and operator of an air-taxi service in Alaska, loaded a customer’s luggage (which contained a single visible six-pack of Budweiser) onto his plane headed to a dry village. For that, he was charged, tried, and convicted of the misdemeanor offense of knowingly transporting an alcoholic beverage into a dry community.
In sentencing him, the trial court viewed the quantity and circumstances as bearing on the actual harm, while on appeal the Alaska Supreme Court treated the broader harms of alcohol abuse in rural Alaska as the relevant context. That court also 3 dismissed as irrelevant that Jouppi was a first-time offender whose conduct was not part of any larger pattern of criminal activity and held that remand for individualized findings was unnecessary because such findings could not change its conclusion. That abstract approach ultimately upheld the forfeiture of Jouppi’s airplane over a passenger’s six-pack of beer. That result cannot be squared with the Clause’s history or this Court’s precedents. The Excessive Fines Clause emerged from a long history of governmental abuse of financial penalties. It was designed in relevant part here to keep punishment proportionate and to prevent the State from wielding fines or forfeitures as unchecked instruments of power or revenue.
Author(s)
Jeffrey L. Fisher, Co-Chair, NACDL Amicus Committee, Washington, DC; Hassan Ahmad, Matthew J. Glover, Larissa Davis, Logan Kirkpatrick, and Noah C. Zimmermann, Covington & Burling LLP, Washington, DC
