The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/cash-register-justice/)
Over the last 15 years, fees and costs for private attorneys in civil rights cases against the city totaled $213 million, the Chicago Tribune found. The city’s new top lawyer vows to rein in such spending.
Advocates, joined by a state lawmaker, are fighting an uphill struggle to end the practice of suspending driver’s licenses for nonpayment of fines, in the face of resistance from courts who depend on the money to fund their operations.
In Ferguson, Mo., the disparity in traffic stops of black drivers has increased by five percentage points since 2013, while it has dropped by 11 points for white drivers.
In the nearly five years since the police shooting of Michael Brown, one of the major impacts was the attention called to how court fines and fees have negatively affected relations between police and minority communities, according to a retrospective by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
The prosecutor in Rapides Parish, La., had ramped up a “pretrial diversion” program and kept the money from fees paid by defendants to avoid charges. That prompted a lawsuit from local officials.
Unable to make bail for his DUI offense, Oklahoman Jeremy Brown opted for a community supervision program that kept him out of jail. He ended up owing $760 to a private company.
Two-thirds of all license suspensions in New York are just for traffic debt. In the upstate city of Rochester, the poor have been hit the hardest.
Under a proposal by the Vera Institute of Justice, the city will be the first in the country to replace money bail and conviction fees— “the twin pillars on which money injustice stands”— with a fair system aimed at reducing the number of individuals held in pretrial detention.
The ruling comes in response to a suit filed by inmates who claim St. Louis is violating their constitutional rights by failing to weigh their ability to pay bonds, among other things, before jailing them.
A state crackdown on driving without a license is making criminals out of tens of thousands of New Yorkers, and straining court systems—with no discernible benefit to public safety, say lawyers and researchers.