Not Just a Ferguson Problem: Community Lawyering Strategies for Challenging Fines, Fees, Bail, and Driver's License Suspensions Targeted against Low-Income Communities and Communities of Color

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Salon 3

Floor: Third Floor

Three and a half years after Ferguson and subsequent interventions by the Obama administration, low-income people across the country, disproportionately individuals of color, are still being saddled with court fines, fees, and penalties, driving individuals deeper into poverty and denying their civil rights. Nonpayment of such fines and fees, coupled with the failure to assess individuals’ ability to pay, leads to late fees, driver’s license suspensions/revocations, bench warrants, arrests, excessive bail, and aggressive collection efforts that negatively impact a person’s liberty, credit, employment, housing, and family.

Monetary sanctions have become complex, pernicious forms of civil and criminal punishment as municipal and state budgets fluctuate, and governments increasingly rely on revenue generated from people charged with municipal and state court violations. Civil rights and criminal law scholars warn that unchecked discretion to impose fines, fees, and bail is proliferating across the country as the preferred sanction for cash-strapped bureaucracies and third-party beneficiaries like bail bond agents, private probation companies, and collection agencies. Even in jurisdictions where an ability to pay assessment has been instituted, reliance on low monetary standards for income (e.g., the poverty line), onerous methods of proof (e.g., letters of verification of public benefits), and excessive amounts of community service have created systems in which equity, fairness, and access to justice remain out of reach for those in need.

The goal of this session is to explore different ways in which lawyers, clinicians, and law students can mitigate this outgrowth and disrupt its expansion locally and nationally, including litigation, legislative advocacy, media advocacy, training, and community education. Specific replicable clinical teaching methods in pretrial justice, criminal justice, civil rights, traffic court/driver’s license suspension, and veteran’s clinics across the country will be discussed and examined by the workshop participants.