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Pilot Ken Jouppi was about to take off in his 1969 Cessna airplane to shuttle a passenger to a remote village in Alaska when state troopers stopped the plane and searched it.
They found a six-pack of Budweiser and more beer among the passenger's groceries, a total of nine gallons. That was a problem because Jouppi and his passenger were bound for Beaver, a "dry" village that bans alcohol.
The state has since sought to confiscate Jouppi's plane over the 2012 incident. But Jouppi has challenged that penalty for more than a decade.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to weigh Jouppi's argument that taking away his plane amounts to a violation of the Constitution's guarantee to be free of "excessive fines."
The court will review Jouppi's appeal of an Alaska Supreme Court opinion that found the state could confiscate the plane, valued at $95,000, because "the illegal importation of even a six-pack of beer causes grave societal harm."
The state argues that the harm is real: Many small communities in Alaska ban or restrict alcohol because they lack the law enforcement and public health resources to combat alcohol abuse and alcohol-fueled violence.
"Given that many communities are accessible primarily by air, the legislature provided that any airplane used to illegally import alcohol into a dry community was subject to forfeiture," the state wrote in its brief to the court.
At trial in 2013, Jouppi was found guilty of knowingly trying to transport beer to the village - a misdemeanor. (A trooper testified that Jouppi would have had to be "blind" not to notice the six-pack in a grocery bag on the plane.) He was fined $1,500 and sentenced to three days in jail. The passenger, who said she was bringing the beer as a gift to her husband, pleaded guilty to the same crime.
Alaska courts have tussled over whether the state could confiscate the airplane, which presently sits on a tarmac in Alaska. Jouppi and his attorneys argue that would be disproportional to the gravity of his offense.
"I'm in my 80s now, and I've been fighting this for over a decade because I see it as my duty to ensure that the Bill of Rights actually means something in protecting against government overreach," Jouppi said in a news release Monday.
He is being represented by the Institute for Justice, a libertarian legal nonprofit. The high court is likely to hear oral arguments in Jouppi's case after it begins its new term in October.
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