Supreme Court unanimously sets limits on civil forfeitures
WASHINGTON — Tyson Timbs admitted he’d sold drugs, and he accepted his sentence without a fight. What he wouldn’t quietly accept was the police seizing and keeping the $40,000 Land Rover he’d had when arrested. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court sided with him unanimously in ruling the Constitution’s ban on excessive fines applies to the states as well as the federal government.
The decision, in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, could help efforts to rein in police seizures of property from criminal suspects.
Ginsburg noted that governments employ fines as a source of revenue.
Timbs, of Marion, Ind., was charged in 2013 with selling $400 worth of heroin. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year of house arrest but faced no prison time. His biggest loss was the Land Rover.
A judge in Indiana had ruled that taking the car was disproportionate to the severity of the crime, which carries a maximum fine of $10,000. But Indiana’s top court said the justices had never ruled that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines applies to states as well as the federal government.
The case drew interest from both liberal groups concerned about police abuses and conservative organizations opposed to excessive regulation. Timbs was represented by the libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice.
“The decision is an important first step for curtailing the potential for abuse that we see in civil forfeiture nationwide,” said Sam Gedge, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice.
Law enforcement authorities have dramatically increased their use of civil forfeiture in recent decades.