Timbs v. Indiana is a United States Supreme Court case arising from the seizure of a car by police in Indiana. The case was argued before the Court in late 2018 and decided in 2019. It concerned whether the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause applies to state and local governments through the Fourteenth Amendment. The Institute for Justice represented Tyson Timbs, and the case is discussed in two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show: a December 2018 episode with IJ attorney Sam Gedge, and a June 2022 episode with IJ managing attorney Bill Maurer.
The story of Tyson Timbs
Tyson Timbs lives in rural Indiana and has worked in a factory for a number of years. After a foot injury, he became addicted to painkillers, and his addiction escalated to heroin. In 2012, after his father died, he received a $70,000 life insurance policy and spent about half of it on a new car. A few months later, an encounter with someone who turned out to be a confidential informant led him to sell a very small amount of heroin to people who turned out to be undercover police officers. He was convicted of a low-level drug offense, and police in Indiana also seized his new car Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Gedge, one of Timbs’s counsel in the Supreme Court, described the seizure as the first step that brought the case to the Court. Bob Zadek framed the seizure as occurring under civil asset forfeiture, a process he said the show had discussed many times, and asked what right law enforcement had to seize the car. Gedge described civil forfeiture as one of the greatest threats to property rights in the nation, allowing state, local, and federal governments to take cars, cash, and homes often without convicting or even charging a person with a crime. He traced its history to the 19th century and pirate ships and smugglers, and said it had exploded in recent decades Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Civil forfeiture, equitable sharing and policing for profit
Zadek raised the related federal process of equitable sharing, describing the federal government as a behind-the-scenes cheerleader that provides a statutory inducement to local law enforcement to seize property under a policy he called policing for profit. Gedge agreed, saying one of the most dangerous aspects of civil forfeiture nationwide is that the police and prosecutors deciding whether to take property are often the same agencies that stand to benefit financially, with the money going back into the coffers of the agencies responsible for the seizures. He said some states had tried to create checks on the worst abuses, but that the federal government offers a work-around: local or state police who do not want to proceed under more onerous state procedures can hand the money to the federal government, which proceeds under more lenient federal procedures and funnels much of the money back to those same agencies. Zadek called the federal government the uber fence Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Zadek emphasized that to seize property, law enforcement needs only probable cause—a suspicion that the property was an instrumentality used in a crime—not a finding of guilt, and that once property is seized the burden shifts to the victim to prove he did not do the crime. He described the result as guilty until you prove you are innocent. Gedge said the standards of proof vary from state to state but rarely approach beyond a reasonable doubt, and that typically the government need only show that the property was connected to a criminal offense—that the property itself is somehow guilty. He cited unusual case names such as State of Indiana v. $100 and a Black Cadillac, and said the process rests on the legal fiction that regardless of the owner’s innocence the property is tainted by crime. He noted that in many states an innocent owner can come to court, hire a lawyer, meet a burden of proof and get the car back, but that this is the opposite of how the criminal justice system is supposed to work Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
Zadek, describing himself as a practicing attorney who represents creditors, contrasted suing a borrower who voluntarily took a loan with having to sue your own government to get back property it improperly took, which he said turns the relationship between government and citizen upside down Awaiting the Verdict in Timbs v. Indiana (2018).
The Excessive Fines Clause and incorporation
In the 2022 episode, Zadek asked Bill Maurer about the Excessive Fines Clause, which he believed to be in the Eighth Amendment, and about how such cases are adjudicated. Maurer said the clause is one of the more underutilized aspects of the Bill of Rights, and that prior to the late 1980s there had been only eight Excessive Fines Clause cases at the Supreme Court. He said that, unlike almost all other aspects of the Bill of Rights, the clause had not been expressly incorporated against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment, meaning the right could not be used as a means to check state power. He said that in 2019 the Institute for Justice went to the Supreme Court in a case involving a forfeiture out of the state of Indiana and got the Court to hold nine to nothing that the Excessive Fines Clause does apply against state and local governments Abusive Fines and Fees (2022).
Maurer said that because there had not been many Excessive Fines Clause cases, the standards courts were supposed to apply to determine whether a fine was excessive were unclear and oftentimes contradictory, and that IJ is now going from state to state trying to establish aggressive protections and standards protective of individuals and their property Abusive Fines and Fees (2022).
In the other 2022 episode, Maurer described the Excessive Fines Clause as based on a restriction in English law dating back to Henry I, with the idea that government is not supposed to use fines to drive somebody absolutely into the ground. He said the problem in England was that the king used fines to strip people of everything they owned, that the principle is in Magna Carta and came into the English Bill of Rights, and that the American founders put a restriction against excessive or cruel fining into state and federal constitutions. He also described the Due Process Clause as another tool, because a system in which the police, the prosecutor and the judge all have a financial interest in the outcome is a tainted system in which the outcome is foreordained. He added that the media is another tool outside the courtroom, since no city council member wants to see their name in the New York Times or the Washington Post over abusing citizens The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots (2022).
Defining excessive fines and ability to pay
Maurer said a key goal of IJ’s litigation over standards is to make clear that a judge must take into account the individual circumstances of the defendant. He offered the example of a $1,000 fine for sleeping outside, a proposal in a city near where he lives aimed at criminalizing homelessness, noting that homeless people would not be able to pay it while Bill Gates has $1,000 in his couch cushions. He said that before 2019 this individualized approach had not been established except in a couple of states, and that it is consistent with the English common law standard under which a fine is supposed to punish but not destroy somebody or turn them into absolutely poverty-stricken individuals. He also criticized governments that split up fines, so that instead of one $500 fine a person receives five $100 fines, each of which may not be excessive on its own; he said you cannot have a constitutional standard that permits the government to engage in a death of a thousand cuts The Hidden Cause of BLM Riots (2022).
Across episodes
The topic is treated in the December 2018 episode with Sam Gedge, recorded while the case was awaiting a verdict, and in the June 2022 episodes with Bill Maurer, after the decision. The earlier episode presents the facts of Timbs’s case and the mechanics of civil forfeiture, equitable sharing and policing for profit; the later episodes state the outcome—a unanimous holding that the Excessive Fines Clause applies against state and local governments—and shift to the standards for judging whether a fine is excessive, including ability to pay and the splitting of fines. The treatment thus moves from the story and the incorporation question to the remedial question of standards, with Gedge advancing the former and Maurer the latter.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the date the Supreme Court heard argument or the date of the decision beyond Maurer’s reference to 2019, nor the vote count beyond his description of it as nine to nothing. They do not describe the reasoning of the opinion, the separate writings, or the procedural path through the Indiana courts beyond Zadek’s reference to the Indiana State Court, the Indiana Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court. The excerpts also do not state what happened to Timbs’s car after the decision, or the current state of the standards litigation Maurer describes.