Key Points

  • The Supreme Court denied certiorari in O'Donnell v. City of Chicago, leaving in place the Seventh Circuit's decision upholding Chicago's forfeiture of cars over unpaid parking tickets.
  • Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Gorsuch, wrote that Chicago's scheme resembles debt collection governed by Tyler v. Hennepin County rather than the forfeiture of property used in violating the law approved in Bennis v. Michigan, and that the city's failure to compensate owners would likely violate the Takings Clause if so.
  • The statement describes a split among the federal appeals courts over whether, and when, exercises of the police power are exempt from the just-compensation requirement.
  • Justice Sotomayor concurred in the denial because the split would benefit from further percolation and because the petitioners' facial challenge made the case a poor vehicle.
  • The statement urges lower courts to define any police-power exemption from just compensation narrowly and to identify its legal source.

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a challenge to Chicago's practice of seizing and keeping motorists' cars over unpaid parking tickets. Two justices wrote separately to say the city's scheme may violate the Constitution's requirement that the government pay for private property it takes.

The court's order in O'Donnell v. City of Chicago, No. 25-1098, stated only that the petition was denied. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Justice Gorsuch, issued a statement respecting the denial. Justice Sotomayor wrote that she had "serious concerns" about the lower court's ruling but agreed with the denial because the legal conflict "would continue to benefit from further percolation" and the case was "not the best vehicle to resolve the split."

The denial leaves in place a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which upheld Chicago's ordinance as "an exercise of the City's police power to enforce its traffic code." The two justices wrote that the forfeitures appear instead to be debt collection governed by the court's 2023 decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County.

Under the city's municipal code, Justice Sotomayor wrote, "a driver who fails to pay as few as two parking tickets risks forfeiting his vehicle to the city." The city may then dispose of the car with no obligation to pay compensation, credit the value against the ticket debt, or return any surplus if the car sells for more than the owner owes. She described the scheme as "vast and lucrative," citing a ProPublica estimate that Chicago collected $264 million in traffic-ticket revenue in 2016, or 7 percent of its operating budget.

The petitioners, Ryan O'Donnell and Michael Goree, are two Chicago motorists subject to the ordinance. According to their complaint, O'Donnell received two tickets for an expired meter and one for time-restricted parking, totaling about $524. Goree had no tickets of his own. A co-signer on Goree's car owed about $560 in ticket debt from a different vehicle.

After the tickets went unpaid, the city towed and impounded both cars and added boot, tow and storage fees. Chicago sold O'Donnell's car for its scrap value of $273 and surrendered Goree's car to the lienholder. The statement says that O'Donnell and Goree received nothing for their cars.

The motorists sued, alleging that the ordinance on its face violates the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause, which bars taking "private property" for "public use, without just compensation." A federal district court in Illinois dismissed the suit, and the Seventh Circuit affirmed in 2025.

The appeals court rejected the motorists' comparison to Tyler, in which the Supreme Court struck down a tax-forfeiture law because the county kept the surplus after selling a home for unpaid taxes. The Seventh Circuit instead relied on Bennis v. Michigan, a 1996 decision in which the Supreme Court held that the government may seize property used in violating the law without compensating the owner.

Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Bennis analogy fails because Chicago does not limit impoundment to cars involved in traffic violations. Instead, she wrote, "the city 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." Goree's loss of his car over a co-owner's debt on another vehicle illustrated the point, she wrote. She added that once a car is impounded, "forfeiture is a consequence only of the failure to pay, not the antecedent legal infraction."

Those features, she wrote, strongly suggest that the scheme exists to collect debts rather than to enforce safety laws. "If so, then Tyler would seem to control, and the city's failure to compensate owners for the loss of their vehicles would likely violate the Takings Clause," Justice Sotomayor wrote. The city's practice of selling cars for scrap or surrendering them to lienholders, instead of selling them at a fair auction, "only amplifies the potential constitutional infirmity," she added, citing the court's 2026 decision in Pung v. Isabella County.

The statement maps a division among the federal appeals courts over "the extent to which the Takings Clause applies to exercises of the police power," a conflict Justice Sotomayor previously described in a 2024 statement in Baker v. City of McKinney. The Federal Circuit and the Tenth Circuit, she wrote, appear to have adopted a categorical rule that the clause does not apply when the government acts under its police powers, and the Seventh Circuit took a similarly broad view in Chicago's case.

Other courts have taken narrower positions, according to the statement. The Fifth and Ninth Circuits have recognized a public-safety or necessity exception to the compensation requirement. The Sixth and Seventh Circuits have held that property damaged during a lawful search or arrest is not taken. Justice Sotomayor wrote that whether any of those approaches fits the court's precedents remains an "open question," and that few of the decisions identify the legal source of a police-power exception, whether the common law, the Constitution or elsewhere.

Justice Sotomayor wrote that the conflict should develop further in the lower courts before the Supreme Court steps in. She added that the motorists brought a facial challenge, which "might require this Court to invalidate even those features of the law that have nothing to do with vehicle forfeiture," such as the code's provisions for immobilizing vehicles.

Justice Sotomayor nonetheless wrote that courts should "carefully and narrowly define the circumstances in which the State's exercise of its police powers are held exempt from the just-compensation requirement" and should explain the source of any such exemption. When a person alleges a "classic taking in which the government directly appropriates private property for its own use" or to pay a debt, she wrote, the "talismanic invocation" of law enforcement authority "may be insufficient to avoid the requirement of just compensation."

"I again encourage courts considering this issue to take care that due deference to state police powers does not eclipse constitutional rights," she wrote.

The denial leaves standing the Seventh Circuit's judgment affirming dismissal of the motorists' suit. The statement leaves the takings question for a later case, one that reaches the court after more lower-court rulings and that does not require judging an entire ordinance.