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Here is the pOST article..
Lawyers from St. Louis University, ArchCity Defenders and a law firm filed lawsuits earlier this week against seven St. Louis County municipalities, alleging they charge illegal fees in their municipal courts.
The defendants are the cities of Beverly Hills, Ferguson, Fenton, Jennings, Pine Lawn, Wellston and Velda City.
The lawsuits, filed in St. Louis County Circuit Court, seek class-action status. The suits ask the circuit court to decide whether the municipal court fees violate state law. They ask for an accounting of who paid fees and how much was paid, and demand reimbursement to defendants who were forced to pay fees to avoid jail time or warrants.
In the case against Pine Lawn, Danette White alleges a warrant was issued for her arrest about Nov. 21, 2013, and a bail of $250 was set. She claims she paid that bail plus a $35 warrant recall fee about Aug. 2.
The suit claims the fee was collected illegally.
Brian Krueger, Pine Lawn’s city administrator, said he investigated White’s claim on Tuesday and couldn’t find any evidence in municipal court records that White had paid a warrant recall fee.
“I’d like to see the receipt,” he said. If she could produce one, he said, he would have cause to look deeper at his city’s municipal court.
Paul Rost, attorney for Fenton, declined to comment until he had read the lawsuit. Stephanie Karr, lawyer for Ferguson, and Donnell Smith, lawyer for Velda City, said they had not seen the lawsuit. Representatives of the other municipalities could not immediately be reached for comment.
The lawsuits were filed by the same lawyers from St. Louis University and the nonprofit group ArchCity Defenders who have been criticizing municipal courts in St. Louis County for months, as well as lawyers with Campbell Law LLC in St. Louis.
A report by ArchCity Defenders on Aug. 14 blasted the area’s municipal court system for jailing clients who can’t afford to pay fines, for mistreating them in court and for blocking outsiders from seeing what goes on.
ArchCity Defenders criticized municipal courts in three cities — Bel-Ridge, Florissant and Ferguson — calling them “chronic offenders” and “prime examples of how these practices violate fundamental rights of the poor, undermine public confidence in the judicial system and create inefficiencies.”
Abuses by municipal courts have attracted greater scrutiny since the fatal shooting Aug. 9 of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer. The shooting set off protests that included demands to improve operations in police departments and municipal courts. The lawsuits come less than a week before a Ferguson Commission meeting scheduled for Monday to discuss predatory municipal court practices.
In October, Missouri Auditor Tom Schweich said that his office would audit at least 10 municipal courts from across the state over the next year — including Ferguson, Bella Villa, Pine Lawn and St. Ann — to make sure they are “about justice and not revenue.”
He said much of his focus would be on a state law capping traffic ticket income at 30 percent of a municipality’s general operating revenue and requiring anything more to be sent to the state for education.
Brendan Roediger, a law professor with St. Louis University and one of the plaintiff lawyers, said the lawsuits were part of a strategy to bring wider reforms to the municipal court system.
“Our goal is to stop cities from filling their coffers with illegal fees and from continuing to conduct for-profit policing,” Roediger said.
In the Ferguson lawsuit, plaintiff Darrick Reed claimed he paid the city a $50 fee to cancel an arrest warrant when he appeared in court to answer to the charge. According to his complaint, the fee is illegal in the state of Missouri and is charged “as a means of profiting from the issuance of traffic tickets and other violations.”
The practice is “detrimental to the community as a whole, as it increases incarceration rates, reduces faith in the court system, creates distrust by citizens of the court, and results in financial harm to the community,” the suit claims.
The suits also include a claim under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act, the state’s consumer fraud statute, alleging the cities attempted to deceive defendants into paying the fees.
The lawyers said the seven suits were just the beginning; they expect to file lawsuits against other cities in St. Louis County.
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