New Hampshire is illegally jailing poor people who can’t afford to pay fines, ACLU says
Debtors’ prisons are illegal and unconstitutional in the United States.
Yet, according to an investigation by American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire released Wednesday, the Granite State has been illegally imprisoning poor people who cannot afford to pay fines.
According to the report, the practice occured in an estimated 148 Circuit Court cases in 2013 and was “startlingly akin to the debtors’ prisons of the 19th and early 20th centuries.’’ The ACLU-NH estimated it cost taxpayers $166,870 to address $75,850 in unpaid fines.
From the report:
In an alarming number of cases where indigent defendants appear in court to address an unpaid fine, judges do not inform these defendants of their rights. Judges do not afford them a lawyer. Judges do not even determine whether they can pay the fine. Judges simply put them in jail.
New Hampshire District Court Judge Edwin W. Kelly told NBC News that the report exaggerated the pervasiveness of the problem.
“I don’t want to minimize the experience for those 148 people, but, put in context, it is not in any way indicative of a system-wide problem,’’ he said.
Kelly said he planned to meet with ALCU-NH representatives on Friday.
“I’m absolutely committed to getting this down to zero, because even one person going to jail unjustifiably is too many,’’ he said.
In 1833, the United States federally outlawed debtors’ prisons. And in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled that states could not imprison a person solely because they lacked the resources to pay a fine, based on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, unless they “willingfully refused’’ to pay.
However, the ACLU-NH said that New Hampshire judges systemically jailed individuals without any “meaningful ability-to-pay hearing.’’
New Hampshire is hardly the first state to be exposed for jailing those who cannot afford their fines. According to NBC News, civil rights groups have also targeted court systems in Louisiana, Alabama, Ohio, Washington, Colorado, and Georgia.
According to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news outlet covering the criminal justice system, the problem persists because the last Supreme Court decision did not specifically define what constitutes “indigent’’ and “willful.’’ In other words, it’s been left to the states to determine whether one cannot afford their fine or if they are willfully refusing to pay.
Either way, as John Oliver recently explained on his HBO show, Last Week Tonight, this sort of practice disproportionately affects poor people.
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To resolve the problem, the ACLU-NH recommended that judges should not impose fines at sentencing if individual cannot afford it and that in such cases courts should provide a lawyer to advise the defendant. They also said that courts should adopt rules that “properly determine whether a person can afford to pay his or her fines.’’
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