A large crowd gathered at the Missouri Court of Appeals inside the Old Post Office building in downtown St. Louis on November 12 to address a work group that the Missouri Supreme Court has appointed to review municipal courts and suggest reforms.
By the time Dave Leipholtz of Better Together St. Louis addressed the work group, more than a dozen people had testified. All but two of them described rampant abuse of power and miscarriage of justice in St. Louis County municipal courts.
And, Leipholtz reminded the work group, “the only two people who defended the current system” –Mark Levitt and Michael Gunn – “profit from the system” as municipal judge and prosecutor..
Before a long night of five-minute testimonies was over, only two more people stepped forward to suggest any remedy other than wholesale consolidation of the county’s 81 municipal courts into one body supervised by the circuit court.
Lillian Eunice, administrator in the North County municipality of Northwoods, said municipalities need to be trusted to work together and self-consolidate, if they wish. And Caroline Ban, an attorney for Beyond Housing, said it is working with some municipalities in its 24:1 coalition to consolidate their courts and suggested that local consent was necessary in the process.
But other than these few voices, the work group was told, over and over again, by residents and activists, by attorneys and law students, by a military veteran and a chicken farmer, that St. Louis County municipal courts are out of control and must be, in effect, put out of business.
“I don’t think our local municipalities are concerned about reforming or consolidating,” said Amanda Brown, a citizen who testified about getting multiple tickets in multiple municipalities for the same offense in one drive down St. Charles Rock Road. She urged the Supreme Court to step in.
Another citizen, Roz Brown, described how municipalities are starting to ticket code violations on properties more aggressively since Senate Bill 5 set a lower cap on how much revenue they can generate through traffic tickets. She said “the debtors’ cycle” of municipal profiteering is evolving, rather than ending – and urged the Supreme Court to intervene.
Nabeehah Azeez, with Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE), gave emotionally charged testimony of “debtors’ prisons” in municipalities paying bills “on the backs of the poor” – and urged, with her voice trembling, “Please consolidate the municipal courts.”
Alisha Sonnier, of the activist group Tribe X, outlined the bare bones of constitutional practice and detailed how it is violated by St. Louis County municipal courts, which she described as “predatory financial shakedown rings” – drawing applause from the capacity courthouse crowd.
Legal advocates who have been working on municipal court reforms, through the Ferguson Commission and other bodies, for more than a year showed out in force.
Karen Tokarz, who serves on the steering committee of the Supreme Court’s new Commission on Racial and Ethnic Fairness, brought three of her law students from Washington University School of Law. Jenny Terrell, Sam Stragand and Jacob Blanton delivered a large binder of documents pointing to flaws in local municipal courts and pointing out best practices – and each argued for municipal court consolidation.
John Ammann, of Saint Louis University legal clinics, gave the committee a vivid portrait of the hell that is a night in St. Louis County municipal courts, where a prosecutor who also is a judge in another municipality calls as witnesses part-time police officers wearing a gun and badge for $11 an hour.
“The cities in St. Louis County don’t follow the law!” Ammann thundered.
Thomas Harvey of ArchCity Defenders – perhaps the most public face of municipal court reform – said no amount of best practices will improve the current system, when a “339-page bench book for municipal courts” already exists, yet unconstitutional practices are rampant.
“The only answer to apartheid was to abolish it,” Harvey said – “the only answer to court fragmentation is to consolidate them.”
The hearing was chaired by Booker T. Shaw, who once presided over the appeals court in that very chamber. Shaw is one of the co-chairs of the Supreme Court’s Municipal Division Work Group, along with two former chief justices, Ann K. Covington and Edward D. “Chip” Robertson Jr.
Also appearing on the bench on November 12 were work group members Kathryn P. Banks, legal services director for Voices for Children; Kimberly Jade Norwood, a professor at Washington University School of Law; Todd Thornhill, chief judge of the Springfield municipal court division; a representative for Kansas City Mayor Sylvester “Sly” James; and Karl A.W. DeMarce, associate circuit judge in Scotland County and municipal judge for Memphis, Missouri.
DeMarce – one of two work group members appointed by The Missouri Bar – showed that not all of its members are persuaded that consolidation is the way to proceed. DeMarce wondered aloud from the bench why all 81 municipalities in St. Louis County can’t be trusted to reform their own courts if that is what they want to do.
Leipholtz of Better Together St. Louis had the answer. He argued that extreme fragmentation makes meaningful oversight of municipal courts impossible in St. Louis County. “The current system in St. Louis County,” Leipholtz said, “is incapable of being managed by anyone.”
And Kennard Williams, with MORE, said this situation affects public perception of the entire criminal justice system. Because municipal court abuses are allowed to continue, Williams said, “There is no trust in Missouri courts.”
The Supreme Court has directed the work group to return a report with recommendations by March 1.
