The owner of a Northern California winery asked the Supreme Court to halt the collection of nearly $4 million in fines levied against it by Napa County, as she appeals the penalties the county imposed for hosting routine wine tastings. She says the fines, which she notes punish ordinary activity for which her business was properly licensed, exceed the value of the entire winery and her personal net worth.
Lindsay Hoopes, proprietor of Hoopes Family Winery Partners, filed an emergency petition to the Supreme Court earlier this month asking the high court to pause the collection of a $1,525,000 fine and $2,250,000 in attorneys’ fees that a California trial court awarded the county, while Hoopes appeals the judgment. Hoopes claims she was fined the exorbitant amounts for hosting wine tastings at her vineyard, which the county recently found to be a “public nuisance,” despite her having all proper licenses and approvals to conduct the tastings.
Hoopes urged the Supreme Court justices to pause the judgment while she appeals the adverse ruling from the Napa Superior Court, warning that if they do not, she will have to immediately pay the nearly $4 million judgment, which “far exceeds both the property’s lifetime revenues and her personal net worth and will force liquidation of the property.”
“The County is already aggressively pursuing execution and collection of the judgment, even though on appeal, Hoopes is challenging these fines as unconstitutionally excessive under the Eighth Amendment, and that claim both raises important questions on which lower courts are split and has merit,” Hoopes’s lawyers said in the petition to the high court.
“If this Court does not act to preserve the status quo, the County will gleefully execute the judgment before Hoopes’s appeal is resolved, the small family winery will likely be liquidated, and Ms. Hoopes will be driven into personal insolvency and may even lose her home, and they will lose their opportunity for complete relief,” the petition continues.
Multiple state courts denied Hoopes’s request to pause the hefty judgment pending appeal, leading her to the Supreme Court for a last-ditch effort to postpone the penalty issued by the state trial court. Hoopes’s lawyers argued in the petition that there are two key Eighth Amendment questions that the high court could resolve with this case, including whether a defendant can be required to pay an excessive fine before a legal challenge to it under the Eighth Amendment can be heard, along with whether courts “must consider a defendant’s ability to pay in the excessive fines analysis.”
THE MAJOR SUPREME COURT DECISIONS REMAINING FOR THIS TERM
The Supreme Court could request responses from Napa County’s lawyers or issue a ruling on the emergency petition at any time.
On the high court’s merits docket, there are 12 cases remaining from the current term that are awaiting rulings in various key cases, including regarding President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order, late-arriving mail ballots, and state laws barring biological males from women’s sports. The Supreme Court is next scheduled to issue opinions on Thursday, with rulings in all of the outstanding cases expected within the next week.