WASHINGTON — After three unpaid parking tickets totaling about $524, Chicago towed Ryan O’Donnell’s car and sold it for its $273 scrap value. He received no compensation. On Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she has “serious concerns” about the federal appeals court ruling that let the city do it.
Her statement, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, came with the Supreme Court‘s denial of O’Donnell’s petition in O’Donnell v. City of Chicago, so the Seventh Circuit’s ruling stands. Sotomayor concurred in the denial because the lower courts are divided and, in her words, “this case is not the best vehicle to resolve the split.”
Under Chicago’s code, a driver who fails to pay as few as two parking tickets risks forfeiting his vehicle, Sotomayor wrote, and the city then has “no obligation to pay compensation, offset the unpaid ticket debt, or return any surplus to the owner if the vehicle is sold for a profit.” The Seventh Circuit upheld that scheme as “an exercise of the City’s police power to enforce its traffic code,” which put it outside the Takings Clause.
The statement, in the court’s Monday order list, notes that Chicago may impound “any vehicle of a delinquent resident so long as ticket debts remain unpaid, regardless of whether the vehicle was involved in an infraction.” If the purpose is debt collection, she wrote, the 2023 ruling in Tyler v. Hennepin County, which invalidated a tax-forfeiture law that kept surplus sale proceeds, “would seem to control,” and the city’s failure to compensate owners “would likely violate the Takings Clause.”
The second plaintiff, Michael Goree, had no tickets himself. A co-signer on his vehicle owed about $560 from a different car, and the city handed Goree’s vehicle to the lienholder, the statement says.
Chicago argued the opposite in its July brief opposing review. It called the case a poor vehicle because the plaintiffs brought only a facial challenge, and said owners can join installment plans with payments as low as $25 a month, which bar booting and impoundment while the owner stays current, or file a compensation claim with the City Clerk if a car was wrongly disposed of. TEH found no city comment on Monday’s denial.
Sotomayor called the scheme “vast and lucrative,” citing an estimate of $264 million in traffic-ticket revenue, about 7 percent of the city’s operating budget, in 2016. The figure comes from a 2018 analysis that ProPublica Illinois reported. It covers all ticket revenue, not car sales, and is a decade old. The statement does not say how many vehicles Chicago has sold since, or what the sales brought in.
The court also denied review, without comment, in Hadley v. South Bend and Pena v. Los Angeles, two appeals-court rulings she cites as examples of how courts treat the police-power question. Sotomayor urged courts to “carefully and narrowly define” when police power exempts a government from paying. She did not say which case might be a better vehicle, and the statement does not name one.
