Georgia's Top Court: "Police Power" Is Not a License to Wreck Your Property for Free

In July 2021, Georgia's Governor's Drug Suppression Task Force flew three helicopters and a fixed-wing plane so low over a licensed, GPS-registered hemp farm in Dahlonega that it flattened two rows of crop worth about $37,000 and spooked the cattle on leased grazing land. When Blue 42 Organics sued, the trial court and the Court of Appeals said the case was dead on arrival: the state was exercising its "police power," so no compensation was owed.

The Georgia Supreme Court just said no, unanimously. "The Constitution's promise to protect private property rights would be an empty one if the State is permitted to avoid paying just compensation for taking or damaging private property merely by invoking the police power." Almost everything government does is pitched as safety, health, or morals, the justices noted, and the state "offers no limiting principle."

The court kept only the narrow, historic exceptions (abating a real nuisance, or genuine urgent necessity) and sent the case back. That is not a $37,000 check yet. It is something bigger: in Georgia, "we were doing law enforcement" no longer ends a property owner's case before it starts.

Your crop, your shop, your car. If the state damages it for a public purpose, the state pays.

Sources: https://reason.com/2026/10/04/police-allegedly-destroyed-37000-of-hemp-the-georgia-supreme-court-just-upended-60-years-of-precedent/ https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/2026/s25g1439.html https://statecourtreport.org/sites/default/files/2026-09/supreme_court_of_georgia-opinion_0.pdf