Timbs v. Indiana

Whether the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause is incorporated against the States under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Petitioner is a recovering opiate and heroin addict. When his father died, he received a substantial amount of inheritance and spent that money on a new car and also funded his heroin addiction.  When the remainder of the money ran out, he began driving the vehicle over state lines to sell heroin and eventually sold to undercover officers on multiple occasions. He was ultimately arrested and his car was seized.  After subsequent guilty pleas, he began probation.  Finally, a private firm, on behalf of the State of Indiana, initiated a suit to forfeit the car to the state.  At that hearing, the court found an Eighth Amendment violation in that forfeiture because it would be “grossly disproportionate to the gravity of [Petitioner’s] offense[.]”  The Indiana Supreme Court unanimously reversed because the United States Supreme Court “has never held that the States are subject to the Excessive Fines Clause[.]” Petitioner argues that Indiana aligned itself with a small minority of jurisdictions that have so held, but the vast majority of courts in other jurisdictions—two Circuit Courts of Appeals and fourteen state courts—have otherwise concluded that the Excessive Fines Clause applies to the states.  Petitioner urges the Supreme Court to reverse the ruling of the Indiana Supreme Court and hold that the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment applies to the states by way of the Fourteenth Amendment.