The Supreme Court of the United States ruled police in Indiana acted improperly when they seized a $42,000 Range Rover from a man who sold a small amount of heroin — a decision that threatens some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in property seizures annually by police across the country.

In a unanimous decision Tuesday, the country's highest court ruled the Range Rover seizure was unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's excessive fines clause.

The ruling noted the maximum penalty for the crime to which Tyson Timbs pleaded guilty was $10,000, while the vehicle was valued at more than four times that amount.

The impact of the ruling, legal experts say, extends far beyond the Timbs case. While not banning civil forfeitures, it prohibits taking money and property that is not consistent with the level of the crime — unless it can be proven that it came from the proceeds of criminal activity.

“The Supreme Court made absolutely clear that the states have to comply with the federal constitution’s protection against excessive fines,” said Wesley Hottot, a senior attorney with the nonprofit Institute for Justice, who represented Timbs.

The case came to the U.S. Supreme Court from the Indiana Supreme Court, which ruled the excessive fines clause did not apply to the states. A judge in Grant County, where the Timbs case originated, had ruled the forfeiture was excessive under the constitution. A panel from the Indiana Court of Appeals upheld that ruling before the state Supreme Court overturned it.

“The big news for us is that the court has signaled that it will police what is and is not excessive with civil forfeiture," said Hottot. "The Indiana Supreme Court believed that state and federal authorities could take whatever they wanted with no federal constitutional backstop and the Supreme Court unanimously rejected that.”

The Indiana Attorney General's office argued the case on the state's behalf.

“We appreciate the court’s attention to the important issues raised in this case," Attorney General Curtis Hill said in a statement. "Although we argued for a different outcome, we respect the court’s decision.”

The Timbs case is now headed back to the Indiana Supreme Court "for further proceedings not inconsistent" with the ruling. Hottot said his group will now work to get Timbs' vehicle back.

"He deserves it back," Hottot said. He explained Timbs had records showing he purchased the Range Rover with life insurance proceeds he received after the death of his father.

A report from the Institute for Justice said police and prosecutors "take hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, cars, homes and other property" every year through the practice commonly known as civil forfeitures.

"Civil forfeiture," Hottot said, "really is the dirty secret of American's criminal justice system."

In the most recent state fiscal year, forfeitures brought in more than $3.7 million from Indiana law enforcement, according to the Indiana Prosecuting Attorneys Council. The year before, the figure was $3.6 million.

The practice is meant to help finance law enforcement, and strip criminals of the profits from their crimes. It also helps reduce the burden of law enforcement costs on taxpayers. Without that compensation, local governments say, law enforcement would be deprived of an important tool to fight crime.

But opponents see asset forfeiture as insidious — an incentive for overreach by government and law enforcement sometimes derided as "policing for profit." The Institute for Justice report notes that many seizures occur without a criminal conviction or guilty plea, leaving owners to navigate "a confusing, complex and often expensive legal process to try to win it back."

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"The next question for the country is what are the limits when the government, perhaps when not even convicting you of a crime, seeks to punish you and enrich itself by taking your property," Hottot said. "The Supreme Court has said whether the police can take your home, your car, your cash, that is ultimately a judicial question. There are limits to civil forfeiture like this one."

It is a question of due process. "At the end of proceedings," he said, "does a judge have an opportunity to say, 'I think that this is over the line.'"

Shawn Boyne, a professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, said the decision has a broader implication to other states, which are using the same procedures "or even more troubling procedures."

"The real problem is that it's really a disproportionate form of punishment because, unlike a fine you might get in a criminal case, that fine is set by the legislature and there's a cap," Boyne explained.

"There's no cap on these and the legislature hasn't said, 'OK, for people caught with a gram of heroin, the limit is X.' So that's why the court says it's excessive, because there's no sense of proportionality between the property that's seized and the actual crime."

Boyne said another problem in Indiana is that the burden of proof in a forfeiture case is lower than in a criminal case. Prosecutors must show only that an allegation is more likely to be true than not. The owner of the property also has the burden of proving property was not used in a crime. That's the opposite a of criminal cases in which the burden of proof falls on prosecutors.

"One other interesting thing," Boyne added, "is that the so-called 'liberal' justices agreed with the so-called 'conservative' justices.'"

Contact Tim Evans at 317-444-6204 or tim.evans@indystar.com. Follow him on Twitter: @starwatchtim