In April 2015, Timbs pleaded guilty to one felony count of dealing. Under the plea deal, Timbs was sentenced to one year of home detention and five years on probation, and he agreed to pay more than $1,200 in probation fees as well as court and police costs. The state also filed paperwork to take Timbs’s car through what’s known as civil forfeiture, in which the government seizes money, homes, vehicles, or other personal possessions, ostensibly as punishment for crimes—though cities are increasingly using the practice as a way to generate revenue.

Read: The bipartisan opposition to Jeff Sessions’s new civil-forfeiture rules

In January 2018, Timbs partnered with the Institute for Justice, where we both work, and filed a cert petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case. Last summer, the Court granted his petition. And in February, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Timbs v. Indiana that state and local governments are bound by the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines, setting a historic precedent against policing for profit.

Until now, the excessive-fines clause in the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment had languished in obscurity, the Rodney Dangerfield of constitutional rights. The Timbs decision has gone some distance to restoring its prominence, but the Court still needs to address a wide variety of crucial issues. What exactly counts as a “fine”? How should courts determine when a fine becomes “excessive”? Should courts consider people’s inability to pay fines or their effect on livelihoods? Ultimately, reining in the systemic abuse of fines and forfeitures will require a combination of further court decisions and legislative action.

“Without my car, it is incredibly difficult to do all the things the government wants me to do to stay clean, like visit my probation officer, go to AA, and keep my job,” Timbs explained to us last spring. “Right now I’m borrowing my aunt’s car to go to work so we can pay the bills, and she has to take a bus back and forth to her kidney-dialysis appointments. Fighting to stay clean is hard enough, but doing it without my vehicle has been even harder.”

“They knew my vehicle wasn’t bought with drug money,” he said. “I’ve already been punished. So what they’re doing amounts to punishing me a second time, and way out of proportion to the crime that I committed.”

In August 2015, an Indiana trial court agreed with Timbs: the Grant County Superior Court ruled that the forfeiture would violate the Eighth Amendment, which says that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” As the U.S. Supreme Court explained in a 1993 decision, the excessive-fines clause “limits the government’s power to extract payments, whether in cash or in kind, as punishment for some offense.”