CHICAGO (CN) - A class of Chicago drivers maintained to a skeptical three-judge panel Wednesday morning that the city of Chicago's impoundment program violates their constitutional rights.
Chicago's impoundment program grants the city the right to seize and hold vehicles it believes have been used in connection with a wide variety of crimes, from drug possession to obstructing a funeral procession. Even if the owner of the car did not commit the crime that necessitated the seizure, owners must pay a penalty to get their car back, which varies from $500 to $3,000.
The class maintains Chicago's policy violates the 14th Amendment's due process clause, the Fourth Amendment's guarantee against unreasonable seizures and the Eighth Amendment's protection from unreasonable fines.
"The penalties imposed on plaintiffs here were done without regard to whether they were legally responsible for the underlying offense. We've raised a few constitutional theories here, and the most straightforward approach is due process," Diana Simpson, an attorney on behalf of the class of drivers, said. "The government cannot hold a car as leverage to coerce an owner to prepay a penalty they don't yet owe. That's the fundamental flaw of Chicago's system. It seizes cars and holds onto them for months, simply to coerce payment. The general rule is that final judgment must come before a penalty."
A lower court, however, disagreed. U.S. District Judge Lindsay Jenkins wrote in her final opinion and order that car owners who loan their vehicles out are still partially culpable because each driver had reason to know their cars might be misused. She cited a 1999 Seventh Circuit case, Towers v. City of Chicago, which rejected an Eighth Amendment challenge to an older version of Chicago's vehicle impoundment ordinance.
"Towers held that even unwitting owners whose culpability 'is not high' but who provided some degree of consent to the use of their cars by others may still be held responsible for misuse of their property under the excessive fines clause," Jenkins wrote in her order. "This was because the $500 fine imposed was not grossly disproportionate to the gravity of the activity that the city sought to deter."
Simpson also noted the findings from other appellate courts and urged the Seventh Circuit to overrule its precedent. The panel of judges, however, pressed Simpson on how her argument squares with certain Supreme Court precedents, particularly Culley v. Marshall, a 2024 ruling that determined that the Constitution does not require a separate preliminary hearing to determine if police can retain seized property pending a final hearing.
U.S. Circuit Judge Michael Scudder asked Simpson outright, "How do you address the majority opinion in Culley?"
"Your Honor, what's going on is, which is that exception to the general rule," she told the Trump appointee. "And so the Supreme Court has authorized forfeiture with its unique historical background, and it's focused on pirate ships and going after that as an exception to the general rule."
"Even the forfeiture cases themselves identify that the general rule is judgment first, that the order of operations is important, this isn't a ready, fire, aim situation, but a ready aim fire situation," Simpson, an attorney with the Institute for Justice, continued. "And so the answer is for the city to treat its impoundment penalties as it does any other civil violation, where it obtains judgment in its favor first, and then it can seek to collect."
David Smith, an attorney on behalf of the city of Chicago, argued before the panel of judges that the decision in Towers foreclosed on the class's central claims. He also reiterated that there is a litany of notices for car owners to retrieve their impounded vehicles, so the plaintiffs' due process claims don't hold water.
"Notably, the city's impoundment ordinance creates a whole lot of processes for owners of impounded vehicles," he said.
"There are multiple forms of mandatory notice, and discovery did show that all of the plaintiffs who moved into discovery did receive notice, and therefore those claims are not on appeal now."
Aside from the U.S. constitutional violations, Simpson also argued the city's ordinance violates the Illinois Constitution's
proportionate penalties clause.
"Chicago's penalty ordinances are blind to whether the person being penalized was 'legally responsible for the underlying offense,'" Simpson wrote in the appellants' brief. "That defect is squarely at odds with Illinois's constitutional protection (holding that $500 punishment based on 'acts which [the defendant] never committed,' violates 'every principle of law.' And it renders the scheme invalid."
The appellants' brief also noted that one of the underlying crimes, license suspension for unpaid tickets, would now be illegal under Illinois law.
Although the state may no longer be able to suspend people's licenses if they have excessive unpaid parking tickets, the city of Chicago can still impound and sell their cars, according to a 2025 Seventh Circuit ruling. Chicago municipal code grants the impoundment and sale of any car registered to someone who has three or more unpaid parking tickets.
It does not require that the vehicle towed was the same one used to commit the violation - rather, it permits the immobilization and sale of any vehicles registered to the ticketed person. A group of Chicago drivers similarly challenged that law, but a Seventh Circuit panel found the impoundment ordinance is an appropriate use of the city's power to enforce its traffic code.
"Without this graduated forfeiture scheme, vehicle owners who repeatedly violate the traffic code could evade punishment. The threat of impoundment and disposal forces them to internalize the consequences of their behavior and, accordingly, deters those violations in the first place," U.S. Circuit Judge Thomas Kirsch, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote in the eight-page order.
Aside from Scudder, U.S. Circuit Judges Candace Jackson-Akiwumi and Doris Pryor, both Biden appointees, appeared on Wednesday's panel. The judges did not indicate when they might rule on the matter.
Source: Courthouse News Service
