Alaska Legislative Council authorizes $50,000 brief defending plane forfeiture law

The Alaska Legislative Council voted 10-0 Thursday morning to hire outside counsel, authorizing the Alaska State Legislature to spend up to $50,000 defending its own forfeiture law before the U.S. Supreme Court.

The money pays for an amicus brief, a filing by a party that is not suing or being sued, in Jouppi v. Alaska, No. 25-246. Senator Gray Jackson made the motion, which also authorized the chair to direct Legislative Legal Services and outside counsel on the filing. The council took up the item after a closed executive session, then approved it, and Chair Sara Hannan announced the result.

Megan Wallace, chief counsel of Legislative Legal Services, described the case to members. "The case involves an Alaska Supreme Court decision holding that it was not unconstitutionally excessive punishment to confiscate the airplane of a pilot whose cargo for a flight to a dry village included alcohol," Wallace said. Central to that ruling, she said, was deference to the Legislature's penalty-setting so long as penalties are not grossly disproportional.

Kenneth Jouppi, a retired bush pilot, was convicted after a 2012 flight loaded at Fairbanks for Beaver, a local option village that bars alcohol importation. State law makes forfeiture of the aircraft mandatory on conviction. The Alaska Supreme Court upheld the loss of his Cessna, valued at $95,000, in 2025. The U.S. Supreme Court granted review on July 20. Its own summary of the case says the Alaska court upheld the forfeiture because the pilot "knew that one of his passenger's grocery bags contained a sixpack of Budweiser."

Jouppi's counsel, the Institute for Justice, argues in his opening brief that a punitive forfeiture must face real proportionality review, and that the state's scheme offers "no protection" under the Excessive Fines Clause, which bars penalties out of proportion to the offense. The Cato Institute, in its own brief, calls the state court's approach "myopic" for weighing the general harms of bootlegging rather than Jouppi's misdemeanor conduct.

Alaska is already defending the judgment. Its counsel of record is Donald Soderstrom of the Department of Law's Office of Criminal Appeals, who filed the state's brief opposing review last November. Eleven organizations filed briefs backing Jouppi on Sept. 9 and 10, the two days before the council voted. Argument is set for Dec. 1.