An Alaskan Pilot. A Six-Pack of Beer. An Important Supreme Court Precedent.

In 2012, Mr. Jouppi agreed to fly a woman up north, to Beaver, a village of fewer than a hundred people, to visit her husband. The Eighth Amendment forbids “excessive fines.” Ask what Mr. Jouppi did, and the confiscation of the plane looks wildly out of scale. Mr. Jouppi was a professional pilot who, a trooper testified, would “have to be blind not to know” what he was loading. The Supreme Court has spent three decades reining in excessive punishments, just not under the Eighth Amendment.