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Supreme Court curbs power of government to impose heavy fines and seize property
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled to drastically curb the powers that states and cities have to levy fines and seize property, marking the first time the court has applied the Constitution's ban on excessive fines at the state level.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who returned to the court for the first time in almost two months after undergoing surgery for lung cancer, wrote the majority opinion in the case involving an Indiana man who had his Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling $385 of heroin.
"Protection against excessive fines has been a constant shield throughout Anglo-American history for good reason: Such fines undermine other liberties," Ginsburg wrote. "They can be used, e.g., to retaliate against or chill the speech of political enemies. They can also be employed, not in service of penal purposes, but as a source of revenue."
Also at National Review, SCOTUSblog, and NPR.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday February 21 2019, @05:51PM
I don't see anything in this ruling that suggests anything would change here. As I noted in my previous post, SCOTUS "firmly established" that forfeiture was a fine subject to 8th Amendment restrictions 25 years ago. The ONLY thing this ruling did was to assert clearly that this clause of the 8th Amendment also applies to state (and local) laws.
You might think that's an improvement -- and it is -- but it already was basically true. Because I'm pretty sure every state constitution has an "excessive fines" clause that parallels the 8th Amendment (or at least statutes to that effect), so legally states were already bound to avoid excessive fines. Furthermore, unless states wanted to challenge the precedent set in Austin by SCOTUS 25 years ago, civil forfeiture would clearly also be subject to oversight as a "fine."
I'm not saying some states or municipalities couldn't have ignored such arguments on the grounds that technically the Eighth Amendment hadn't been incorporated against the states and technically even though their state also had an excessive fines clause, it might not be required to mean the same thing as the Eighth Amendment and technically therefore Austin might not be a governing precedent. I'm sure some cases probably happened like that -- but I also think they'd be open to a challenge in federal courts even before this ruling, and states would likely have lost.
Indiana tried to argue what you said, i.e., that forfeiture of property is not a fine, thereby taking an end run around Austin, and SCOTUS was having none of it, because the Indiana Supreme Court didn't even raise that as an issue.
What this ruling WILL do is somewhat limited, but possibly substantial -- mainly that it makes all claims about "excessive fines" clearly subject to 8th Amendment concerns rather than the state constitutions, etc. they were subject to before. What that means is that it will be easier to establish consistent precedent across many states, rather than having to determine what "excessive" is, as interpreted by each state's jurisprudence individually.
I find it disgusting too. Unfortunately, I think the media is portraying this ruling as doing a lot more than it likely will. Even a cursory internet search turns up quite a few stories from specific states where government officials are already saying, "huh... well, this probably won't change anything about what we do in forfeiture cases." SCOTUS gave no guidance of what might count as "excessive."