NEW ORLEANS — A Louisiana judge is running a modern-day debtors’ prison by sending poor defendants to jail when they can’t pay fines and charging them a questionable “extension fee” to avoid jail time, civil rights lawyers claim in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The Southern Poverty Law Center filed the lawsuit against Judge Robert J. Black in Bogalusa and the Bogalusa City Court. It’s the latest in a wave of legal challenges across the country to a system that opponents say criminalizes being poor.
Civil rights lawyers in September filed a similar lawsuit in New Orleans alleging that hundreds of people had been locked up because they lacked the money to pay court fees and thousands more are threatened with arrest each year for nonpayment of court debts. Similar cases have been brought in Washington, Mississippi and Missouri.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday contends the judge routinely jails people who can’t pay fines for minor traffic or misdemeanor offenses without checking to see why they can’t pay. The lawsuit described one man who was fined $450 for stealing $5 worth of groceries and then jailed for four hours when he couldn’t pay fine or the extension fee. Eventually a cousin paid the $50 extension fee, and he was released.
The group contends the Bogalusa court system uses court costs and fees to cover budget shortfalls from 20 to 30 percent.
“The City Court is funded off the backs of the poor,” the lawsuit says. “This structural conflict of interest creates an incentive for Defendant Black to find individuals guilty and to coerce payment through the threat of jail. Without this money, the City Court could not function.”
The lawsuit also alleges Black created an “illegal $50 extension fee to buy additional time to pay their monetary penalty” that is not authorized by state law. Defendants who can’t pay their fines and fees are faced with the “false choice” of either going to jail or paying the extension fee, the lawsuit contends.
The group is representing four plaintiffs — Rozzie Scott, Ebony Roberts, Latasha Cook, and Robert Levi — from the small town of roughly 12,000 people about 75 miles north of New Orleans.
The class-action case seeks a declaration that what Black and the court are doing is unconstitutional and an injunction to stop them from continuing the practices. It also seeks damages for people who paid the extension fee in the last year.
The lawsuit says the “… unconstitutional practices have affected, and will continue to affect, hundreds of low-income people with citations for traffic tickets or misdemeanor violations in the City of Bogalusa, Louisiana.”
