At the hands of Chesterfield police, North County resident Autumn Mae was thrown in an adult jail for five days when she was 17 because she didn’t have car insurance.
Her parents didn’t know where she was for the first 24 hours because she was not allowed to call them. She had to stay in jail because her family struggled to find the money to get her out.
Now at 21, she’s protesting the flawed municipal court system in St. Louis County, which has recently been criticized for profiting from their most impoverished residents.
“There are people doing serious crimes out there,” she said. “How can you jail people for just for traffic tickets?”
Mae and members of Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE) protested Thursday outside the office of St. Louis Court Circuit Court Presiding Judge Maura McShane. They demanded that McShane meet with them about addressing the much-needed reform in the county’s 80-plus municipal courts. Activists said she did not respond to their letters or phone calls previously.
“These municipalities cannot be trusted to fairly deal with municipal ordinance violations, and McShane has not done enough within her power to hold the courts accountable,” said Julia Ho, an organizer with the MORE.
After about 30 minutes, McShane’s representatives invited the activists in to share their stories and present their demands.
“She took notes and didn’t cut them off when they shared their stories,” said Jeff Ordower, executive director of MORE. “Those are all things that show the marks of someone who is trying to create dialogue. Whether she is willing to execute the power she has is a different question.”
Currently, the court system has a reform committee that is considering changes to the municipal courts. Activists said that a resident – particularly someone who has experienced first-hand of the effects of the bench warrant system – should be on the committee. McShane said she would consider it.
Derek Laney of MORE said the committee should also consider alternative ways to pay for fines, such as a time bank. Residents use work hours instead of dollars to pay for tickets. That would prevent warrants and arrests that lead to people losing their jobs and going into severe debt, he said.
Right now, municipal courts are “using poor people as an ATM,” he said.
McShane said a reform committee – headed by attorney Frank J. Vatterott, a municipal judge in the City of Overland – is working on these ideas.
The morning of the activists’ protest, Vatterott had sent out an email to municipal judges and administrators announcing the month-long “St. Louis County 2014 Holiday Amnesty Project.”
From Dec. 1 to Dec. 31, residents can pay $100 to get their warrants recalled and get back on the court docket without having to pay warrant fees. Local nonprofit Better Family Life helped the committee organized the program. In the letter, Vatterott urged the courts to participate. So far 15 courts have agreed, he said.
“Our community is undergoing difficult times, and there is a pressing need for the St. Louis County area municipal courts to pull together quickly and offer some strong relief and community service for the people in our region,” the letter stated.
In an interview with the St. Louis American on Friday morning, Vatterott responded to some of the concerns raised by MORE and other groups, including Saint Louis University law professors and Arch City Defenders – a group of lawyers who represent low-income clients.
In regards to MORE’s request of adding an affected resident on the St. Louis County Municipal Court Improvement Committee, he said he didn’t think it was a good idea.
“It is not a listening committee; it’s a working committee,” he said. “They want to be heard, but that isn’t doing the work. These are lawyers with legal backgrounds. We are all pro-bono. I’ll listen to them, but I can’t give them a task to do legal research or look up statutes – they can’t do that.”
When asked about the make-up of the committee, he explained there are 16 members. James Clark, who heads up Better Family Life’s annual amnesty program, sits on the committee – as well as Annette Slack, vice president of the Mound City Bar Association. About five or six of the members are African American, he said.
The Arch City Defenders have been advocating for the courts to charge fines according to the defendants’ income levels. With the court systems’ current bench warrant system, poor residents are often caught in a “black hole” of court debt, said Thomas Harvey, executive director of the Arch City Defenders. First, they get tickets for traffic or other minor infractions. Since they can’t pay them, they don’t go to court for fear of getting thrown in jail – subsequently getting warrants for failing to appear. Having warrants, they can’t get jobs, drivers’ licenses or sometimes aid from homeless shelters, he said.
“The fines should not be as high as they are, and they should proportioned to income,” Harvey said. “You wouldn’t have near as many problems as you have now.”
One way to do this would be to hold a hearing to consider evidence of a defendant’s ability to pay fines and court costs prior to assessing fines, Harvey said.
Vatterott said this was unrealistic.
“If we held a hearing on whether or not they could pay, that would… we just can’t do that,” Vatterott said. “It would take 10 times as long in court. These are people’s courts. If everyone had a hearing, you would be there until 5 a.m.”
And charging varying fines could potentially be unconstitutional, he said.
“The constitution says equal protection, so everyone is treated the same,” he said. “Is that against the constitution? That’s what we are really studying. We are trying anyway.”
However, he said the committee is working on offering community service as an alternative to paying fines. Showing a food stamp card could be an easy indication that they qualify for community service, he said.
In Sept. 18 letter, Arch City and SLU professors also asked McShane to address the fact that municipal courts were charging illegal fines.
Vatterott said the committee has already established “uniform court costs,” because some courts were in fact “charging fees that they weren’t supposed to.”
Harvey said the main issue that the committee should address is the fact that the cities are subsisting off of court revenues. At the state level, any court revenue above the costs goes towards education – not to the general state funds, he said.
Across all political lines, elected officials and organizations are denouncing the county’s fine structure, he said. Most recently, the nonprofit Better Together released a report showing that the 90 municipalities in St. Louis County rake in 34 percent of state’s all municipal fines and fees – $45 million in 2013. However, their combined populations only account for 11 percent of Missouri’s population.
In addition, municipal courts are used most frequently as a revenue stream in municipalities north of Olive Boulevard and within the boundary of I-270 – or areas that have high African-American populations. In fact, 20 of the 21 municipalities that derive at least 20 percent of their general budget from fines and fees are located in that geographic area.
“It shouldn’t be the case that the generation of revenue is the goal of the justice system,” Harvey said. “Those two things should be divorced completely. Generation of revenue and administration of justice should be separate.”
