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 you get slapped with a $100,000 fine for parking your car on your own property.

It sounds absurd, but as my newest video shows, that'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 says. "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 ask Jouppi's lawyer, Mike Greenberg.

"In most places," he replies. 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," says 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," says Jouppi. "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," says 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 now the U.S. Supreme Court will hear it.

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 demands he pay them more than $400,000. A California court upheld that penalty. Northern Californian Chief Magistrate Judge Donna Ryu wrote, "Government suffered a significant tax loss."

Finally, bureaucrats in Humboldt County, California, took aerial photos of people's property to search for unlicensed marijuana farms.

When they saw greenhouses, they fined property owners.

Blu Graham was fined $900,000, "$30,000 a day, when all I've ever done is grow vegetables in my greenhouses."

"There actually was no marijuana on the property!" says Greenberg. "They were just guessing that if you built a greenhouse, this must be connected to marijuana."

Finally, a lawsuit 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 appear in my video to explain these fines. 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.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post How Local Governments Turn Minor Violations Into Financial Ruin appeared first on Reason Magazine.

Back in 1983, the Supreme Court declared that "a person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another." That increasingly doubtful proposition underpins a nationwide network of more than 144,000 AI-assisted cameras that track the travels of innocent motorists across the country billions of times each week.

So far, state and federal courts have almost uniformly rejected constitutional challenges to automated license plate readers (ALPRs) installed by companies such as Flock Safety. But in a decision that could signal a shift in the legal treatment of Flock cameras, a federal judge in Oklahoma recently recognized that they enable "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance."

ALPRs are much more sophisticated than the technology that the Supreme Court considered in 1983, when it approved the warrantless use of a radio transmitter that helped police tail a suspected methamphetamine manufacturer's car. Three decades later, by contrast, the Court said police should have obtained a search warrant before attaching a GPS tracker to another drug suspect's car.

The majority opinion in the latter case emphasized the physical intrusion necessary to install the tracker. But five justices embraced an alternative rationale, saying GPS tracking impinges on reasonable expectations of privacy by revealing potentially sensitive information about the target's historical whereabouts.

That theory came to the fore in a 2018 case involving mobile-phone location data collected by cell sites, which the majority said implicated the Fourth Amendment because "individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements." The Supreme Court reiterated that principle this year, extending it to data collected by Google's Location History feature.

"An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone's location," Justice Elena Kagan said in the majority opinion, "and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information." By similar logic, U.S. District Judge Sara E. Hill concluded this month in the Oklahoma case, people have a reasonable expectation of privacy in ALPR records, and police therefore generally need a warrant to search them.

Those databases include "information about all vehicles that pass by any network-connected camera at all times," which police can peruse "on demand," Hill noted. "Freedom from persistent, dragnet-style surveillance while in public is not a foreign concept in our society, and it is a reasonable expectation that society already accepts," as reflected in the Supreme Court's cellphone decisions.

Like cars, cellphones "move in public places where people can see you in plain view," Hill wrote. "But it becomes constitutionally problematic when law enforcement can indiscriminately and passively catalog your whereabouts over an extended period of time and then use that information for any purpose whenever convenient."

At this point, Hill's decision is an outlier. "It appears that nearly every court examining the issue to date has determined that ALPR technology use is not a search under the Fourth Amendment because people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements on public streets," she noted.

Last month, for instance, a federal judge in California held that ALPR database searches are "clearly distinguishable from and less extensive than the 'near perfect surveillance' achievable" with cell-site or Location History data. And the day after Hill's ruling, a state judge in California rejected a challenge to San Jose's Flock camera network, saying "there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in license plate data collected from cameras directed solely at public streets."

A federal lawsuit involving the same city's ALPR system, which the Institute for Justice filed last April, is still pending. So are challenges to Flock cameras in cities such as Wichita, Kansas, and Norfolk, Virginia.

Even when they reject such lawsuits, courts commonly acknowledge that the legal picture could change as the number and capabilities of ALPRs multiply. If so, it seems likely that Hill will eventually be joined by other judges who recognize the perils of "indiscriminate mass surveillance."

© Copyright 2026 by Creators Syndicate Inc.

The post Other Courts Should Heed a Federal Judge's Warning About Flock-Enabled Mass Surveillance appeared first on Reason Magazine.

The high court said Tuesday it will hear arguments on whether Izuchukwu Ozurumba's cooking job for leaders of the Unknown Gunmen qualifies as providing "material support" for a terrorist group.

The Trump administration argues that DOGE is exempt from FOIA's requirements as a presidential advisory body.

As one advocate warned India’s Supreme Court on Monday that “this country will burn” unless action is taken to stop what thousands of protesters have denounced as an illegal purge of voters by the head of the Election Commission of India, the court demanded accountability from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Chief Justice Surya Kant […]

The post Indian Supreme Court demands government answers on voter purge appeared first on Asia Times.

No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil […]

The post Big Oil fears the evidence of its deliberate climate lies appeared first on Asia Times.

The US Supreme Court on Monday night rejected a bid by the Trump administration to keep onerous US Postal Service rules for mail-in ballots in place, which voting-rights defenders said risked depriving millions of people of the franchise in this year’s midterm elections.

After a back-and-forth legal battle over the USPS rules that dragged on for months, the nation’s highest court issued the 7-2 ruling without elaborating on its legal reasoning, though right-wing Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas issued dissents in favor of President Donald Trump’s side.

The ruling in USPS v. California was in response to a legal challenge brought by the League of Women’s Voters, the attorneys general of numerous states, and others who argued that newly-announced rules by the Postal Service regarding mail-in ballots, changes prompted by an executive order issued by Trump, would prevent people from having their ballots counted and cause chaos for those trying to administer this year’s elections.

A victory for democracy, a defeat for election deniers. https://t.co/MKjfKmgyTv

— David Crowley (@DavidCCrowley) September 15, 2026

In response to the ruling, the plaintiffs’ legal team said the decision was “a critical step to ensuring free and fair elections this November by maintaining access to mail voting for millions of eligible voters across the United States and lifting the dire threat that the Postal Service would disenfranchise them.”

“Mail voting is safe, secure, and reliable—and the Trump administration has presented no evidence to the contrary, as the courts have repeatedly recognized,” the statement continued. “We will remain vigilant in countering threats to free and fair elections and ensuring that every eligible voter is able to cast a ballot and have it count.”

“Today’s decision is a victory for our democracy and a powerful affirmation of the rule of law,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement. “The stakes in this litigation could not have been higher.”

Virginia Kase Solomón, president and CEO of Common Cause, was among the other pro-democracy advocates who welcomed the decision.

“Today’s decision is a major win for the millions of everyday Americans who count on vote-by-mail—our seniors, service members, busy parents, rural voters, and voters with disabilities,” said Solomón in a statement. “Vote-by-mail is safe, proven, and vital; even the president uses it. This executive order was a blatant power grab designed to silence voters and undermine our elections, but it failed because the people and the law were on our side. Our Constitution is clear: states run our elections, and voters choose their leaders—not the other way around. No administration can strip the people of their power.”

Michael McNulty, senior policy director for Issue One, a nonpartisan group that works to defend free and fair elections, also welcomed the ruling, but said vigilance would still be necessary going forward.

“The fight to preserve states’ authority to administer elections is far from over,” warned McNulty.

“President Trump continuously and falsely claims fraud in mail-in voting without evidence,” he added. “Despite voting multiple times with this method, he remains obsessed with centralizing control over elections to tilt the playing field. However, for now, one piece of that centralization effort is blocked, and it ensures that mail-in voting for the midterms won’t be disrupted.”

Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court heard an appeal from death row inmate Terry Pitchford, who was denied relief by the Mississippi Supreme Court after his attorneys claimed Black people were illegally struck from his jury. Investigative reporter Hannah McAlilly delves into the case, and into the wider problem of racial prejudice in the selection of juries in Mississippi:

A prosecutor struck a Black woman for having “red dyed hair” and in another, a prosecutor struck a Black man because he had “a ponytail, a sort of strange hair design.” That prosecutor told the judge he was concerned the juror might identify too closely with the defendant, who also was of a similar age. “Both have unusual hair styles,” the prosecutor said. 

Prosecutors struck Black jurors who, they said, seemed angry, irritated or inattentive. A Black woman was struck because the prosecutor didn’t like her “vibe.” Another, who worked a night shift before showing up to jury selection, was struck for being “fidgety” and looking “angry.” Another was struck because she “frowned a lot.” 

Dr. Uzma Khan sought an urgent hearing of her contempt petition over the government’s decision to transfer the PTI founder to PIMS instead of Shifa International Hospital.

The post Supreme court rejects early hearing in PTI founder’s hospital case appeared first on BOL News.