When Jonathan Smith was scouring through records of Ferguson’s police department and municipal court, he learned how the court and police had “destroyed the lives of thousands of African-American residents,” he said at the National Consortium on Racial and Ethnic Fairness in the Courts on Tuesday, May 16.
At the time, Smith was chief of the Special Litigation Section of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.
“We saw dozens of emails of how they used the court and police department to raise money,” said Smith, who is now the executive director of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.
And this profiting was “racialized,” he said. In 2014, Ferguson made 53,000 traffic stops, 50,000 non-traffic stops and had 30,000 warrants in a town of only 21,000 people.
“If I get a traffic ticket, usually I go online to pay it,” Smith said. “In Ferguson, you got to go to court.”
Almost all the people who stood in the long lines awaiting the judge to hear their cases were black, he said. If you couldn’t pay the fines – which included $700 for not mowing your lawn – then you could be put in jail, he said.
On May 16, Smith was on a panel to talk about municipal court abuses in St. Louis County and court reforms that have occurred since the unrest.
After Smith spoke about the investigation, the moderator then turned to Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Patricia Breckenridge, who also sat on the panel, and asked, “So, chief, what did the Supreme Court know about what was going on in the municipal courts?”
Before Ferguson, the Supreme Court “knew very little,” Breckenridge said.
She explained that before the late 1970s, the municipal courts were autonomous in Missouri. But a constitutional change brought them under the supervision of the presiding judge of the closest circuit court, and ultimately the state Supreme Court. But in reality, she said, “little supervision was occurring.”
“Even though that happened 35 years ago, there was little recognition of the change or of that constitutional obligation to supervise,” Breckenridge said. “There was no mechanism for monitoring the municipal general operations.”
The Missouri Supreme Court didn’t even have a list of all the state’s municipal courts. Breckenridge said the court’s response initially after the unrest brought to light the court abuses was a “real disappointment.”
“We think of ourselves as the ones who wear the white hats and we’re the check on the legislative branch for passing certain legislation, on the executive branch for not the following the law or overreaching,” Breckenridge said. “It was a real shock to understand that it took the other branches to come in and be a check on the judicial system for the abuses that were occurring.”
However, Breckenridge said the high court immediately “owned” the municipal divisions.
“What we did absolutely from the very beginning was to accept responsibility for the problem,” Breckenridge said. “To announce publicly that the judicial system would not rest until the municipal courts met the same standards of all our courts.”
Many advocates for court reform did not remember the Supreme Court voicing that responsibility.
At one point in the discussion, Breckenridge said she wanted to correct herself.
“When I said that the court knew very little before Michael Brown was shot, there was an exception to that,” she said. “About two months before the shooting, the court received a letter from ArchCity Defenders … and they said there were inequities in the St. Louis County system.”
The court discussed the list of inequities provided by ArchCity Defenders, a nonprofit civil rights law group, she said. The group said they would send another letter with steps they wanted the Supreme Court to take to fix the issues. Then Ferguson happened. “We didn’t receive that letter because obviously there was less need for it,” Breckenridge said, “because the call to action came in a much stronger way.”
Later, one woman expressed what many in the 200-plus audience were thinking. “It’s kind of hard to believe that no one had any inclination as to what was going on,” the woman said. “With all these various groups and you get this letter two months before this whole thing breaks.”
Breckenridge said that because it didn’t come through the court system, they thought everything was going good.
“Our role has always been that lawsuits are filed, and we listen to evidence and facts and make our decision,” Breckenridge said. “It is uncomfortable for us to accept that we have to go outside our comfort zone and respond. Courts respond slowly and thoughtfully, and acceptance that urgent action is needed is foreign to us.”
Supreme Court rules on SB5
The same day as the panel, the Missouri Supreme Court handed down its ruling on Senate Bill 5, a 2015 bill that imposed new reporting requirements on municipalities and lowered the cap on the amount of revenue that the municipalities can generate from traffic violations to 20 percent. However, the bill set the revenue cap at 12.5 percent for certain municipalities – which only St. Louis County munis met the criteria for – and required their police departments to meet certain accreditation standards.
However, 12 St. Louis County municipalities challenged the law, and a circuit court found these requirements for the county were “unconstitutional special laws.” On May 16, the state Supreme Court announced that it agreed that the 12.5 percent was unconstitutional but not the police accreditation standard. Now the whole state must abide by a 20-percent cap.
The Organization for Black (OBS) released a statement on May 16 saying that they believe the law discriminated against the St. Louis County municipalities, but that the law should have set the bar at 12.5 percent – not 20 percent – for the entire state.
“OBS was disappointed that the mainly black municipalities followed the historically racist practices of using black citizens as cash cows or – in the words of former U.S. Attorney Eric Holder – as “ATM machines,” OBS stated.
The state legislature also passed bills that limited fines to $300 for minor traffic and non-traffic violations and prohibited incarceration for such violations or failure to pay fines. The bills clarified that warrants couldn’t be issued for failure to appear in court.
Breckenridge said at the panel discussion that the state Supreme Court developed an “indigency form” that people could present to the judges, stating that they can’t afford to pay the fines. However, she said, what often happens is that judges offer a payment schedule but never mention the option of claiming indigency.
“If they can’t ever pay, you are just setting them up for failure by imposing a payment schedule,” she said.
The court is working on establishing a case management system online, she said, and the presiding judge in St. Louis County has shown a commitment to monitoring the municipal courts.
Overall, she understands that there is a deep level of mistrust from the community that these changes will be sustained for the long term.
Thomas Harvey, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, said, “We really haven’t gotten much” in terms of court reforms in Missouri, though stopping municipal courts from imposing illegal fines and using jails to squeeze money out of people is an improvement. “Almost all of this was required by law, but there wasn’t active oversight,” he said.
Now the Missouri Supreme Court needs to take leadership in actual reforms, he said, and ArchCity and its allies plan to keep pushing until they do.
