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Imagine getting a bill from your local government for $900,000 because they see a greenhouse on your property and just assume you’re growing marijuana without a permit.
Imagine government demanding $400,000 because you didn’t know to fill out a single-page form.
Or getting slapped with a $100,000 fine for parking your car . . . on your own property.
It sounds absurd, but it’s really happening.
How can that be? Doesn’t America’s Constitution say government may not impose “excessive fines”?
It happens because some bureaucrats, savoring their power, act like tyrants.
At least now there is hope for a remedy: One of these excessive-fine cases has reached the Supreme Court.
Ken Jouppi worked as a pilot in Alaska for 30 years, until one day state troopers stopped his plane before takeoff.
“I didn’t think we had anything to hide,” he said.
“They searched the airplane, opened up this lady’s boxes of groceries and found beer.”
Transporting beer. That was his crime.
“Isn’t beer legal in America?” I asked Jouppi’s lawyer, Mike Greenberg.
“In most places,” he replied — but some towns in Alaska ban beer.
Jouppi was convicted of bootlegging.
Every pilot must know which town has what rule, and search everybody?
“They think pilots should search people’s luggage,” said Jouppi.
“It was such a terrible thing to do to another individual, invade their privacy and assault their dignity . . . I just didn’t feel right about doing that.”
Alaskan officials say the beer was visible, so Jouppi should have known about it.
They jailed him for three days — and seized his plane.
“That airplane was my primary source of income,” Jouppi said.
“Without it, I didn’t have a business anymore.”
I assumed such excessive punishment would be dismissed quickly by a court.
But it wasn’t.
“Jouppi has been fighting to keep his plane for 14 years,” said Greenberg.
“The plane is still sitting on a tarmac . . . It’s a ludicrous situation where the state has every interest in going after valuable assets rather than actually fighting supposed harms of alcohol.”
Greenberg’s law firm, the Institute for Justice, took Jouppi’s case, and the US Supreme Court will hear arguments on Dec. 1.
I hope he wins. It’s just wrong when governments destroy lives for small mistakes.
They’re also doing that to Tuncay Saydam, a retired professor.
The IRS demands he pay $400,000 because he didn’t know to fill out a one-page form about an old bank account in his native Turkey.
“The fines,” says Saydam, “will destroy my life . . . We have never been rich.”
His unpaid tax is less than $30,000, but the IRS wants him to pay more than $400,000 in penalties.
A California court upheld the penalty fees: Northern California Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote that “government suffered a significant tax loss.”
Finally, bureaucrats in Humboldt County, Calif., took aerial photos of people’s property to search for unlicensed marijuana farms.
When they saw greenhouses, they fined property owners.
But Graham was fined $900,000 — “$30,000 a day, when all I’ve ever done is grow vegetables in my greenhouses,” he said.
“There actually was no marijuana on the property,” said Greenberg. “They were just guessing that if you built a greenhouse, this must be connected to marijuana.”
A lawsuit finally got the county to promise to end its “ruinous fine system.”
But it took four years.
Why do governments fight to keep outrageous fines that punish largely innocent people?
“Unlike other forms of punishment,” says Greenberg, “fines make the government money.”
“The prosecutor’s office, state troopers, they get to keep the proceeds. It’s an abusive system because they have every incentive to continue to prosecute.”
I invited the heavy-fining judges and government lawyers to explain these fines to me.
None would agree to talk about it.
Bureaucrats always want more money.
It’s a reason the Constitution prohibits excessive fines.
I trust that the Supreme Court will put a stop to these abuses.
John Stossel is the author of “Government Gone Wild: Exposing the Truth Behind the Headlines.”