Supreme Court takes pilot’s plane fight over six-pack of beer
Ken Jouppi says Alaska’s bid to take his $95,000 Cessna over beer bound for a dry village violates the Eighth Amendment.
By Georgia Hale · Staff Writer
3 min read
The Supreme Court will hear an Alaska bush pilot’s bid to stop the state from taking his $95,000 airplane after a passenger brought a six-pack of beer onto a flight headed for a village where alcohol was banned.
The case centers on Kenneth Jouppi, who was convicted of a misdemeanor alcohol offense after Alaska authorities found the beer before his 2012 flight from Fairbanks to Beaver, a remote dry community. The court agreed Monday to review his appeal, according to the Supreme Court docket.
Jouppi argues that forfeiting his 1969 Cessna would violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. Arguments are expected in the fall. Under Supreme Court rules, at least four justices must vote to accept an appeal.
In a statement released by his lawyers at the Institute for Justice, Jouppi said he was pleased the justices took the case and said the fight had grown beyond him and his aircraft.
“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 the statement.
A six-pack found before takeoff
The episode began in April 2012, when Jouppi was set to fly a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver. According to the account in court materials, the passenger had packed beer with groceries in her luggage.
Alaska State Troopers searched Jouppi’s plane before departure and found a six-pack of Budweiser inside a shopping bag, according to the case record.
Jouppi, his company and the passenger were charged with knowingly transporting alcohol into a dry community, a misdemeanor. The passenger pleaded guilty. After trial, a jury convicted Jouppi and his company. A judge sentenced Jouppi to three days in jail.
The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported at the time that Judge Patrick Hammers said the case should send a warning to other pilots. “A message that if you do it (help alcohol smugglers) and get caught, you lose your airplane,” Hammers said, according to the newspaper. “A message that it’s not worth it.”
Alaska won in state court
The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that taking Jouppi’s plane under the state’s criminal forfeiture laws would not be an excessive fine.
Jouppi’s attorneys at the Institute for Justice told the U.S. Supreme Court that Alaska’s high court looked at his conduct in the abstract and failed to weigh whether it was part of a wider criminal pattern. They said it was not.
“Few excessive fines cases will present the issue so sharply; a decision upholding the forfeiture of an airplane for a six-pack is a self-recommending candidate for review,” the Institute for Justice wrote in its petition.
The Alaska Attorney General’s office urged the justices to leave the state ruling alone, calling it a “fact-bound decision.” State lawyers said courts use a multi-factor test to decide whether a forfeiture is grossly disproportional to an offense, and argued that Jouppi was challenging how the Alaska Supreme Court weighed those factors rather than the legal standard itself.
Alaska’s lawyers also argued that Jouppi had not shown the loss of the aircraft would be grossly disproportional. In their filing, they said alcohol abuse is a serious problem in rural Alaska and that aircraft can be the only practical way to bring alcohol into some communities.
Jouppi’s lawyers said the Alaska ruling conflicts with decisions from other courts, including U.S. Supreme Court precedent. “The Excessive Fines Clause was built for cases like this,” they wrote.
This story draws on original reporting from CBS News.