This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, February 19th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The case of Thames v. Indiana established that the excessive fines clause of the

Eighth Amendment applies to to states that is state

governments now must consider the proportionality of their takings but for

Tyson Tim's who had his expensive trucks stolen by Indiana cops over a matter of drugs

nearly a decade ago that may be cold comfort the state is continuing to pursue its

case Sam Gedge of the Institute for Justice discusses how Tyson Tim's and Indiana are still fighting.

Let me crow about the Institute for Justice briefly and say that a conversation I was having some years ago with Dan Albin and one of your fellow

attorneys at the Institute for Justice and he said one of the things that IJ has

discovered is that in many cases the government really

doesn't care that much about winning and while government having sort of a blase attitude about things it can mean very bad things

for justice.

It at least provides this a potentially incredible avenue for challenging that injustice and it seems that the

Mr Tim's case is a pretty clear cut example of that.

So walk us through Mr. Tim's experience

with the government of Indiana.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the most amazing part of Tyson's case so far is just how long it's been going on. The state of Indiana has been trying desperately to forfeit his Land Rover for just under eight years now. So I won't I won't walk through all of those eight years but

basically Tyson's bought this case up a for every level of the American judicial system. We represented him at the US Supreme

Court. We won there on an important threshold issue of whether the 8th Amendment successive

fines clause applies at all to the states.

That was two years ago now and the state of Indiana has spent the past two years continuing

...