Slaughter, J.
The State sought to forfeit Defendant’s Land Rover after he used it to transport illegal drugs. The trial court held the proposed forfeiture would violate the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause. We conclude the Excessive Fines Clause does not bar the State from forfeiting Defendant’s vehicle because the United States Supreme Court has not held that the Clause applies to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Factual and Procedural History
Defendant, Tyson Timbs, used life-insurance proceeds after his father’s death to pay $42,058.30 for a Land Rover in January 2013. Over the next four months, Timbs regularly drove the Land Rover between Marion and Richmond, Indiana, to buy and transport heroin. …
… In 2015, Timbs pleaded guilty to one count of Class B felony dealing and one count of Class D felony conspiracy to commit theft in exchange for the State’s dismissing the remaining charge. The trial court accepted the plea and sentenced Timbs to six years, with one year executed in community corrections and five years suspended to probation. …
Within a couple months of bringing criminal charges, the State also sought to forfeit the Land Rover. After a bench trial, the court issued written findings that denied the State’s action, concluding that forfeiture would be an excessive fine under the Eighth Amendment. … Based on its holding, the court ordered the State to release the vehicle immediately. A divided Court of Appeals affirmed. State v. Timbs, 62 N.E.3d 472 (Ind. Ct. App. 2016). …
Before addressing whether forfeiture of Timbs’s Land Rover would be an excessive fine, we must decide the antecedent question of whether the Excessive Fines Clause applies to forfeitures by the State. …
… Only after ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment did the Supreme Court, in the early twentieth century, begin to apply various provisions of the Bill of Rights to the States through the doctrine of selective incorporation. …
To date, the Supreme Court has incorporated most of the first eight amendments … At issue here is whether the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause is enforceable against the States. …
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… in a case involving not a fine but another punitive-damages award, the Supreme Court stated in dictum that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause “makes the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishments applicable to the States.” Cooper Indus., Inc. v. Leatherman Tool Group, Inc., 532 U.S. 424, 43334 (2001) …
Despite Cooper’s 2001 dictum that the Clause can be enforced against States, the Supreme Court’s most recent pronouncement on this subject, in 2010, suggests the Clause has not been incorporated after all. McDonald, 561 U.S. at 765 n.13. …
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So where does that leave us? Given the lack of clear direction from the Supreme Court, we have a couple of options. One option is to ignore McDonald and follow the lead of some courts that have either applied the Excessive Fines Clause to challenged state action or assumed without deciding that the Clause applies. …
A second option is to await guidance from the Supreme Court and decline to find or assume incorporation until the Supreme Court decides the issue authoritatively. We choose this latter, more cautious approach for two reasons. First, although the Supreme Court has addressed this issue only in dicta, its statement in McDonald that the Clause has not been incorporated is entitled to more weight because it is the Court’s most recent. Second, Indiana is a sovereign state within our federal system, and we elect not to impose federal obligations on the State that the federal government itself has not mandated. …
Although we ultimately disagree with our Court of Appeals’ decision to apply the Excessive Fines Clause to the State’s forfeiture, we understand the Court’s reason for doing so. … We reserve to ourselves—not the parties—the prerogative to pronounce what law governs a particular dispute. The parties’ consensus here to subject the State’s forfeiture to review under the Clause does not require that we follow suit. And we decline to do so, mindful that our colleagues on the Court of Appeals and the trial court may be correct in foretelling where the Supreme Court will one day lead on whether to apply the Clause to the States.
To be clear, our decision on incorporation should not be read to prejudge the merits of pending or prospective forfeiture challenges based on other provisions of state or federal law. Our narrow holding here is confined to the Court of Appeals’ reliance on a provision of the United States Constitution—the Excessive Fines Clause—that the Supreme Court has never enforced against the States. We decline to address other potential problems with the State’s forfeiture because Timbs raised only an excessive-fines challenge under federal law.
Because we have resolved the Eighth Amendment issue against Timbs, we turn to whether the State proved its entitlement to forfeit the vehicle under Indiana law. The governing statute provides, in pertinent part, that to obtain forfeiture the State must show that a person used the vehicle to transport an illicit substance listed in the statute for the purpose of dealing or possessing the substance. …
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After a bench trial, the trial court made the following factual findings relevant here.
Between the date of purchase, and May 31st, 2013, [Timbs] drove the vehicle frequently from Marion to Richmond to purchase heroin. The Land Rover was used by [Timbs] to transport heroin back to Marion. [Timbs] both used and sold the heroin. When the Land Rover was seized by the State at the end of May 2013, the odometer reading was between 17,000 and 18,000 miles. The increased mileage primarily resulted from [Timbs] traveling between Marion and Richmond to engage in illegal drug trafficking.
On appeal, Timbs challenges these findings under the corpus-delicti rule, which requires independent evidence of a crime beyond the defendant’s confession. But the rule applies only to an out-of-court confession in a criminal proceeding and thus does not benefit Timbs. See Willoughby v. State, 552 N.E.2d 462, 466 (Ind. 1990). Timbs’s inculpatory testimony occurred in court, while his counsel was present, in this civil-forfeiture proceeding, where he admitted to multiple trips to Richmond in the Land Rover to acquire heroin and transport it back to Marion. … These findings establish each of the statutory elements recited above to prove the State’s entitlement to forfeit the Land Rover—namely, that Timbs used the vehicle to transport and possess heroin, a schedule I controlled substance, id. § 35-48-2-4(c) (Supp. 2013), and a narcotic drug, id. §§ 35-48-2-4(c), 35-48-1-20(1) (2008 Repl.), for the purpose of engaging in illegal drug trafficking.
For these reasons, we reverse the trial court’s judgment for Timbs and remand with instructions to enter judgment for the State on its forfeiture complaint.
Rush, C.J., and David, Massa, and Goff, JJ., concur.