After law professor Fareed Hayat finished his meal at a Maryland pancake restaurant, he put his three kids in the rear-facing seats in the trunk of his Tesla. Someone believed he was kidnapping them and called the police. Officers went to Hayat’s home and questioned him and his wife on their porch. Professor Hayat denied that there was a kidnapping and tried to go inside, telling officers they could not come in. They stopped him from shutting the door, then entered the hall to handcuff him. They released him after determining that he had not kidnapped anyone. 

Professor Hayat brought a civil rights suit. The district court granted the defendants’ motions to dismiss and for summary judgment, holding that the officers were entitled to complete a Terry investigative stop by entering a house. The Fourth Circuit affirmed this decision.

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Recently, the proliferation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—led by private surveillance vendors like Flock, Axon, Motorola, and Verkada—has come under increased public scrutiny. Proponents of ALPRs—which I call “Flockers”—insist that the mass surveillance dragnet merely tracks public movements and is an indispensable crime-fighting tool. But Americans are rightly skeptical. 

And late last month, a federal jury in San Antonio shot back at the “Flockers.” 

On behalf of the Institute for Justice client, Alek Schott, 12 ordinary citizens found Bexar County liable for operating an unconstitutional mass-surveillance regime. The scheme was as predictable as it was abusive: ALPRs logged travel patterns and flagged a Houston father as suspicious. A sheriff’s deputy then manufactured a pretextual traffic violation on I‑35 to interrogate Schott, prolong his detention, and search his vehicle using a Probable Cause Creating (PCC) dog. The jury properly awarded Schott exactly what he asked for—$76, representing one dollar for each minute he was unlawfully detained.

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Kekai Watanabe alleges that after being brutally assaulted in a federal prison and while in 10-out-of-10 pain, a government nurse told him “to stop being a crybaby” and refused to send him to the hospital. Mr. Watanabe’s coccyx was broken. Untreated for years, the bone chips migrated into his soft tissue.

Mr. Watanabe says the nurse’s deliberate indifference to his serious medical need is an Eighth Amendment violation and that he can seek relief under the Supreme Court’s longstanding Bivens precedent. He filed this suit asking for his injuries to be treated by a specialist and for damages. The Court of Appeals permitted his suit to proceed.

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George Anibowei is a Dallas immigration lawyer and a naturalized US citizen who travels abroad regularly. Since October 2016, border agents have searched his cell phone without a warrant five times. During the first search, agents copied the entire contents of the device, including privileged communications with his clients. Nearly a decade later, the government still has that data.

Mr. Anibowei sued the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, challenging the agencies’ policies that let agents rummage through travelers’ devices with no warrant and, for so-called basic searches, no individualized suspicion at all. The district court denied him relief, and the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Mr. Anibowei now seeks Supreme Court review. 

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For the past 14 years, 83-year-old Ken Jouppi has been trying to prevent the State of Alaska from seizing his airplane. Mr. Jouppi is an Air Force veteran and has been flying charter planes in Alaska since the 1970s. Alaska has a number of villages and municipalities that are “dry,” where the sale, importation, and even possession of alcohol are illegal. Mr. Jouppi agreed to fly a customer to one of these locales. But the plane was stopped by police before takeoff—the passenger had packed alcohol in her luggage and carried three cases of Budweiser and Bud Light onboard to share with her husband on his birthday. Mr. Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor, sentenced to the minimum three days in jail, and ordered to pay a $1,500 fine. But Alaska also mandates forfeiture of any airplane used in connection with transporting alcohol to dry villages. Hence Mr. Jouppi has been fighting for the past decade and a half to save his $95,000 plane. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear his case.

Cato, joined by the Fines and Fees Justice Center, filed an amicus brief arguing that this forfeiture is an unconstitutional excessive fine. The Eighth Amendment was designed to prevent this kind of abuse. Long before the United States was founded, the common law protected people from extreme monetary penalties. The Framers understood the dangers of such abuse. But the Alaska Supreme Court’s view is that challenges to excessive fines “should rarely succeed.” This dismissive view led the court to conclude that there is nothing excessive about the forfeiture of an airplane worth “only 9.5 times the maximum fine”—and over 60 times the fine actually imposed.