Council called on to dismiss outstanding traffic warrants
7th October 2019 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
The movement continues to build toward eliminating the drastic, negative effects on average citizens when governmental agencies and courts revoke driver’s licenses and issue arrest warrants simply because the citizens can’t afford steep traffic and court fees and fines, as well as other court-imposed costs.
On Sept. 25, a group of activists, public defenders and elected city officials gathered at New Orleans City Hall to propose a resolution to the City Council calling for the dismissal of all outstanding criminal warrants and financial penalties that the activists believe reinforce and perpetuate a cycle of poverty within the city.
The action included the unveiling of a detailed report that chronicled the flaws in the current legal system that perpetually crushes the city’s more vulnerable populations. The presentation also included a multi-point list of demands and recommendations that activists are posing to city and court leaders.
Toya Ex, the leader of Stand with Dignity, a grass-roots organization that’s taken the lead locally on the issue, said the protestors’ presence at City Hall hopefully signals a shift in practice and in policy that can start to benefit the poor and make the court system more equitable.
“It was the first time a Black-led organization like this was not only present at a City Council meeting, but was able to move a resolution forward,” Ex told The Louisiana Weekly. “This report came from the brains of our membership.”
She added that the current model of judicial discretion in issuing warrants is funded off the backs of the city’s poor, including many people of color. She said a structure needs to be developed that shifts court funding from punitive measures toward rehabilitation and support for the people trapped in the cycle of poverty.
Toya said wealthier citizens benefit from the current system because they’re disproportionately able to immediately pay fines or fees they may receive – if they receive any such encounters with law enforcement and resulting financial punishments – and thus avoid paying crippling late fees or finding themselves the subject of an arrest warrant.
“We need a larger percentage of the money that comes from the rich people to instead fund programs that get to the root cause of why people get into the court system in the first place and trapped in the system of debt,” she said.
While the report and list of proposed actions are comprehensive and complex, the group’s ultimate goal is very basic.
“We want to see people getting a second chance,” Ex said.
Nationwide, the battle has also been enjoined by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which last month filed an amicus brief in a court case based in Kansas and now before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the ability of law enforcement to conduct a traffic stop – an action that often leads to the driver’s arrest based just on things like unpaid parking tickets, parking fines and unpaid child support – simply because the officer knows the driver’s license has been revoked.
The Kansas case has become a battleground over citizens’ rights under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The SPLC’s intervention in Kansas v. Glover is one of several similar cases across the country into which the social-justice organization has waded.
Samuel Brooke, deputy legal director for the SPLC’s Economic Justice Project, said the revocation of driver’s license for certain non-violent crimes and an assortment of municipal fees prevents the citizen in question from traveling to his or her job, a failure that often results in dismissal from employment. When that happens, Brooke said, the citizen falls further in poverty and exacerbates the inability to pay the fines and fees that landed him or her in the desperate situation in the first place.
Brooke told The Louisiana Weekly that such actions serve to feed into the crippling cycle of poverty many at-risk populations face in the country. In addition, he said these governmental and bureaucratic machinations disproportionately affect citizens of color.
“Our clients, especially those being released from the correctional system, suffer the collateral effects of losing their driver’s licenses,” Brooke said.
He said such blows can severely hinder ex-convicts – especially African American and Latinx – from establishing stable, productive post-release lives. Their struggles mirror the challenges overall facing minority populations who lose their driver’s licenses and other rights because they are poor.
“These arrests [after traffic stops] disproportionately affect the communities in neighborhoods of color,” Brooke said, “where there are more traffic stops and arrests. All of that plays a role in people being able to make their livelihood.”
“We have clients who are significantly impacted by [license revocation] because the effects then spiral out of control,” he added, noting that roughly 11 million people are impacted nationally.
While Brooke said definitive statistics on exactly how many people in Louisiana and New Orleans are affected by this process don’t exist at this point, plenty of evidence exists of the overall negative effect of strict and severe enforcement of failure-to-pay laws in Louisiana have been found.
However, there are signs that Louisiana might be taking steps to bring more fairness and leniency to the subject of license revocation and arrest stemming from poverty. In a recent report entitled, “Driven by Dollars,” the Legal Aid and Justice Center noted that Louisiana is one of only four states that revokes licenses only if a determination process finds that a person did have the ability to pay the fees and fines but refused to do so.
That legal provision was instituted this spring, when the Louisiana State Legislature passed and Gov. John Bel Edwards signed into law an act easing the imposition of non-payment penalties. The law, which took effect Aug. 1, allows for a judge to sentence a defendant to community service or to grant an extension of time to pay late fines and fees to prevent harsher penalties such as license revocation.
But an even more critical part of the new law provides for a judicial review process aimed at determining whether a defendant failed to pay fines because of an inability to pay stemming from poverty or other pressing factors, or simply because he or she refused to pay.
Supporters say the new state law could go a long way toward breaking the cycle of poverty inherent in the previous system of license-revocation and arrest for non-payment.
Local figures, leaders and organizations have recognized the troubling implications of outstanding fines, fees and arrest warrants can have on minorities and the poor. That includes the Orleans Public Defenders office, which has been working to minimize and even remove the judicially-imposed cycle of poverty for some time.
“As part of our focus on criminal justice reform, we have long been concerned about the ways the criminal justice system, and a tiered system of justice, has been treating the poor because of their poverty,” Danny Engelberg, the OPDLA’s chief of trials, told The Louisiana Weekly.
Engelberg said that while the Kansas case now before the U.S. Supreme Court centers on a somewhat different and more layered subject – pulling over drivers, and subsequently arresting them in many cases solely because a law enforcement officer knows they are driving illegally – than the revocation of licenses for non-payment of fines and costs, the entire topic of unfairly targeting the poor and minorities for severe judicial consequences of traffic infractions and warrants is extremely pertinent in Louisiana.
Engelberg said the court system – including the USSC – needs to be made aware of the complexity and contextual background of all such cases. He said that no less than the USSC must be convinced to take up and consider similar litigation and legal actions.
“We certainly know that this is happening across the country,” Engelberg said, “and it affects millions of people across the country, and disproportionately affecting communities of color. People of color are more likely to be stopped [by law enforcement], more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.”
To that end, officials from the Orleans Public Defenders office joined Stand with Dignity and the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice at New Orleans City Hall late last month to propose to the City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee a resolution calling for the dismissal of all outstanding warrants, fines and fees that are keeping people in a cycle of poverty.
Activists cited a recent report in the Washington Post stating that one in seven adults in New Orleans have a warrant out for their arrest. According to a new Stand with Justice report, “NOLA Shakedown: How Criminalizing Fines & Fees Traps Poor & Working Class Black New Orleanians in Poverty,” 44,373 city residents have had a total of 55,047 arrest warrants issued for them for various low-level offenses since 2000.
In addition to those facing charges for failure to pay traffic fines, fees and other court costs, more than 7,000 of the warrants are for disturbing the peace, about 5,700 are for public drunkenness, and many others are for failure to appear in court or non-violent offenses like trespassing and basic marijuana cases.
The Stand with Dignity study – which was presented during the Council Criminal Justice Committee’s meeting as a supporting argument for the dismissal of tens of thousands of outstanding warrants – found that the number of such warrants continues to rise, and that 69 percent of the people with outstanding warrants are Black.
Several Council members gave their support of a resolution calling for the wiping out of arrest warrants, including Councilman Jason Williams, who formally filed his own proposal for such an action. The Criminal Justice Committee, after hearing the testimony of the activists, approved the resolution, 4-0. The resolution now moves to the full City Council for final approval.
“Poor residents committing victimless crimes of desperation and poverty are too often trapped in a hopeless cycle of outstanding fines and resulting warrants that ultimately drain taxpayer resources without making us any safer,” Williams said in a statement to The Louisiana Weekly. “It is absolutely necessary that we partner with the various justice system actors to provide widely supported relief from these dated and inactive cases.
“I commend those Municipal Court judges and clerks who have taken significant and proactive steps to reduce instances of failure to appear and duplicative warrant entries,” Williams added. One of those steps is the court’s launch of a text notification system to remind defendants of court dates.
Keith Lampkin, William’s chief of staff, said the Council expects to discuss the resolution at its full Council meeting on Oct. 17. He noted that if passed, the resolution would be non-binding, and the judges and staffers in the City Attorney’s Office would have the actual power to implement the changes recommended by the Council.
Toya Ex said she’s hopeful the Council will be able and willing to continue helping Stand with Dignity and other activists with further efforts, including taking the movement to the state level, such as asking the state Office of Motor Vehicles to reassess OMV’s fines and fees system that activists feel also places poorer people in more debt, this time owed to the state.
The “NOLA Shakedown” report and presentation also laid out several other demands and recommendations to city officials and local judges, ones that not only forgive current debts and wipe out all existing outstanding warrants for poverty offenses, but put in place mechanisms that shift the court’s focus from financial punishment to rehabilitation programs that address the fundamental reasons trapping the poor.
Those ideas include offering community-based options such as marriage counseling, parental training and anger management courses that can help citizens avoid repeat encounters with law enforcement and the court system; and issuing letters for free driver’s license reinstatement that encourage defendants to work with the city and the state to get their ability to drive – and, as a result, to work and provide for their families – back as soon as possible.
Toya Ex said she and her colleagues left the rally two weeks ago with optimism that more progress can be made toward making the court’s fines and fees system more equitable and humane. Some advances have been made, such as court pilot programs that have chipped away at the mountain of citizen debt and the City Council’s willingness to work with the activists, but she said if such momentum isn’t sustained, those programs would be put in jeopardy.
“The system would stay the same,” she said. “We’d end up right back in the same situation. In two years, we’d end up in the same place. We need to prevent that by creating a model that judges can use to assess people’s ability to pay.”
This article originally published in the October 7, 2019 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
