Eddie KABACINSKI Committee to RETAIN for the City of Warren DISTRICT 5 COUNCILMAN

Judiciary Courts

Article 3, Section 1 of the United States Constitution - The Court System :

" The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services a Compensation which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office. "

Article 3, Section 2 of the United States Constitution - Judicial Power, Jurisdiction, and Jury Trial :

" The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and Treaties made, or which shall be made, under their Authority;—to all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls;—to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction;—to Controversies to which the United States shall be a Party;—to Controversies between two or more States;—between a State and Citizens of another State;—between Citizens of different States;—between Citizens of the same State claiming Lands under Grants of different States, and between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects.

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury; and such Trial shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed; but when not committed within any State, the Trial shall be at such Place or Places as the Congress may by Law have directed. "

Jails, prisons, courtrooms, the whole justice system became overcrowded and so the costs kept rising too.
States were struggling with budget deficits and to keep the budgets balanced and politicians were under pressure not to raise taxes,so what did states do ?
States, as their criminal justice system has expanded, they needed money to run it and courts have found a new source of funding.
Municipalities and states put pressure on courts to charge defendants more and more fines and fees, in order to subsidize the cost of running the courts.
Across the country, municipalities have come under scrutiny for the way they raise revenues through court fines.
Fines and fees are often mandated by lawmakers, and they grow when budgets are tight.
Court administrators are bound by law to collect them and they started charging user fees to the defendants who came through the criminal justice system.
The use of fines and fees charged to criminal defendants has exploded.
There is tremendous growth in a number of fees and the amount that states charge on felonies and simple misdemeanors like driving offenses and these extra charges and costs can typically add up to hundreds and even thousands of dollars per person.
Many defendants know that getting involved in a criminal proceeding can be expensive but they are probably thinking about attorneys fees.
Cash strapped courts, states and municipalities help fund themselves by charging a growing number of user fees to defendants and inmates, even for services like a public defender.
Defendants now get charged for a long list of government services, things that were once free including things that are required, constitutionally required like even having a public defender.
In at least 43 states plus the District of Columbia judges are allowed or required for indigent defendants to be charged and billed at least a small upfront administrative application fee which ranged for $10 in New Mexico, up to $400 in Arkansas but some states charge reimbursement fees even often add up to hundreds of dollars for a public defender that can add up to thousands of dollars.
Many court administrators express concern about the growing use of fees and the courts have justified this by saying, look, even poor people can afford something.
Maybe it is that small upfront administrative application fee or maybe they will get a good job tomorrow, or they will win the lottery and you can charge them, and they will owe you for that later.
Sometimes it is a debt that gets charged for more.
What you might not know about unless you have been there are the other fees that are increasingly being charged to defendants when they go through court or to prison or receive probation or parole.
In at least 41 states inmates can be charged and billed for room and board while in jail and prison stays; in at least 44 states, offenders are going to get billed for their own probation and parole supervision; and in 49 states, there is a fee now charged for the defendants to wear those electronic bracelet that monitors people when they are out of jail.
Fees for things like home detention and probation services are leaving some poor defendants thousands of dollars in debt.
Courts in all 50 states are requiring more of these payments, as defendants are now charged with added long lists of fines and fees for court services, including even for the cost of a public defender, room and board for jail stays and handed a bill for more and more of the costs of their own trials, sentences and supervision when they leave jail.
So they passed on more and more user fees to the defendants and nationwide the costs of the criminal justice system in the United States are billed and paid increasingly by the defendants and offenders.

Defendants go through the court; they accept a plea deal to avoid time in jail and maybe it is on some nonviolent misdemeanor.
You get charged to be evaluated by the jury of your peers.
They sign the plea deal and they are glad they have not gone to jail.
They have not really been paying attention to all the things that are in this deal.
They get billed for their court ordered alcohol and drug treatment.
It might be that there are some provisions, they have to pay all these fines and fees and courts put defendants who are indigent, unemployed, homeless or living on disability checks are put on payment plans that often come with added fees.
Often a probation officer or a court official will make a recommendation based on an interview with the defendant or based on a questionnaire.
In many cases, their punishment was not for their original crimes but for their inability to pay the rising court costs.
These are supposed to be in manageable amounts, but sometimes, these defendants who can not pay their fines and fees get charged extra fees or then interest on what is owed.
Defendants with money can pay their hundreds or thousands of dollars in fines and fees right away, they are usually done with the court system.

You can lose your welfare benefits.

There was 1 flaw in this because in many cases, those defendants are most of the time too poor to pay the fines and often they are very poor.
Impoverished poor defendants in United States court systems fall behind on payments, these can add up to hundreds even thousands of dollars in court costs, then they can not afford it, and they fall behind, it is a problem particularly in Michigan.
How do poor defendants pay hundreds or thousands of dollars in debt ?
It can be a hardship for many indigent defendants when they fall behind and do not keep up the monthly payments, then they violated probation and courts then will order arrest warrants issued for your arrest when you do not pay court fines and fees.
Defendants who can not afford those charges get billed for the cost of their own arrest warrants and many defendants do end up going to serve jail time anyway for not paying, not for the original, low level misdemeanor, but because they did not pay their fines and fees.

As a result that creates harsher treatment for the impoverished to face such as more interest charges and even jail time, putting them further into debt than those who can afford to pay right away.
It puts indigent defendants in jail without adequately trying to determine whether the person has the means to pay court fines and fees or without then offering adequate alternative ways to pay off a fine, like being offered the chance to do community service.
City officials say traffic fines protect public safety, and they need to punish the many defendants who can pay but simply refuse.
Hundreds of thousands are hiding from police and the courts.
Some defendants simply ignore the courts and refuse to make any payment and every day, defendants still get sent to jail for unpaid court fines and fees because they failed to pay their court debts.

You can lose your driver's license.
A large number of suspensions are for reasons that have nothing to do with unsafe driving.
These reasons include unpaid traffic tickets, falling behind on child support, getting caught with drugs, bouncing checks, not paying college loans, graffiti, littering or minor juvenile offenses like school truancy, using false identification to buy alcohol, or shoplifting.
Drive drunk, drive recklessly, and the state can suspend your driver's license.
At least 18 states will suspend someone's driver's license for failure to pay the fines on nondriving traffic violations.
4 states will suspend it for not paying parking tickets.
It all started with laws passed by Congress in the late 1980s.
First, a law took away the driver's license of men who did not pay child support.
Some of the biggest court imposed debt results from child support.
Many of the men in the report said they came out of prison owing tens of thousands of dollars in child support that had accumulated while they were incarcerated and unable to earn money. The report recommends that those payments be suspended automatically when someone is in prison.
The National Child Support Enforcement Association says just the threat of losing a license makes a difference.
Billions of dollars of child support are collected each year using this tactic.
Then came one for people caught with drugs.
Next, state lawmakers added hundreds of reasons that had nothing to do with unsafe driving.
Many police and motor vehicle administrators worry about a recent trend.
Increasingly, people who study driver safety say this makes little sense.
The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators raised concerns that police and state and local motor vehicle officials find too much of their time and budget tied up going after American citizens with suspensions for minor lawbreaking that has nothing to do with safe driving.
The study finds that impoverished defendants who go through the criminal justice system almost always get cash from family and friends to help pay their court ordered fines, even though those family and friends are often poor, too.
There has been little research on the impact court fees can have on a defendant's family but many defendants are impoverished.
There is also evidence that when sovereign American citizens lose a license for reasons unrelated to safety, they take suspensions less seriously.
At least 75 % of the sovereign American citizens who have had their licenses revoked just keep driving, according to the federal National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
No research shows that suspending a license will make someone likely to change this behavior.

The American Civil Liberties Union took a different approach and argued in a 2013 lawsuit that the state discriminated against poor sovereign American citizens when it took away their driver's licenses for failure to pay court fines and fees.
Plaintiffs in the lawsuit say they were indigent and got caught up in a cycle of increased fees, debt and jailing.
Civil rights lawyers are using a new strategy to change a common court practice that they have long argued unfairly targets the poor.
At issue is the way courts across the country sometimes issue arrest warrants for indigent sovereign American citizens when they fall behind on paying court fees and fines owed for minor offenses like traffic tickets.
Now attorneys are aggressively suing cities, police and courts, forcing reform.
About 200,000 drivers had their licenses suspended that year for not paying the fines but a court has largely rejected the argument.

Defendants do not know their right to ask for a hearing and, for judges, those could clog up the court schedule.
They note that defendants can petition courts to get relief from debt, perhaps substituting community service.
There still needs to be training, and not just of judges.
United States lawmakers and judges are feeling some urgency to solve the same problem, how to stop sending defendants to jail simply for failing to pay court fines and fees, often because they are too poor to afford them.
Many judges and other supporters of the current system say fines and fees are necessary to hold defendants accountable for their offenses.
Judges had no set standard for determining who was too poor to pay court fines and fees that typically run hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Judges say it is difficult to determine who can and cannot afford to pay their fines and fees, there are wide discrepancies in how judges make those decisions.
Some judges will tell an offender to give up their phone service, or quit smoking cigarettes and use the money instead to pay court debt.
Some judges will tell impoverished defendants to get the money from relative family members or to use Temporary Aid to Needy Family checks, Social Security disability income, veterans benefits or other welfare checks to pay their court fees first or else face going to jail.
Some judges said, look, we can only take your time or your money, and we need this as a punishment.
When defendants struggle to pay those fees, they have violated probation and go to jail.
The practice is called " pay or stay " pay the fine or stay in jail.

In 1 Michigan county where defendants like, Frederick Cunningham pleaded guilty to forging a prescription for pain medication and then was surprised when he was billed and told to help pay for over $1,000 in court costs.
Those included $500 to reimburse the local program that paid for the impoverished man's court appointed attorney and charged $500 to help pay the costs of running the county courthouse including the salaries of court employees, the heating, the phones, the lights, the copy machines, the courtroom security, and even to underwrite the county employees fitness gym.

Stephen Papa admits he was wrong that day last August in Grand Rapids, Michigan when he and some friends spent the day drinking, and then climbed to the roof of an abandoned building.
They were arrested, and Stephen Papa was later sentenced to 22 days in jail.
It was not for what he did that day, but because he could not pay his fines.
Stephen Papa was a homeless veteran of the Iraq War, who was living on friends' couches.

When he appeared in court the month after his arrest, the judge expected him to pay an installment on the $2,600 he owed in restitution, fines and court fees.
The judge ordered to pay and wanted $50, but Stephen Papa had only brought $35 to court that day.
Stephen Papa says he tried to raise the money by doing chores.
He was able to build a shed for a friend's grandparents.
The judge in Grand Rapids District Court said he could have tried harder, and made money by collecting cans or cutting grass.
Before Stephen Papa walked into court that morning, things were starting to get better for him.
Just the week before, he had found a good paying job making $12 an hour at a small steel factory.
Stephen Papa said from the Kent County Jail : " I tried telling the judge, throwing me in jail is going to do you no good. You are not going to get your fines like you want, and I am going to lose my job, and you are really not going to get your fines if I do not have a job. It just baffled me. "
But that is what happened, Stephen Papa lost his new job.
He went to jail for 3 weeks, and when he came out someone else had filled it.
Today he is working as a security guard but gets paid $4 an hour less than he was making at the steel plant.

Kyle Dewitt, also from Michigan, went to jail after he failed to pay his fines from catching a fish out of season.
Kyle Dewitt's problems began when, on a Michigan river in 2011, he thought he had caught a rock bass. But a Michigan Department of Natural Resources Conservation Officer said it was a small mouth bass, which was out of season.
At the time, Kyle Dewitt was a 19 year old man and the father of a baby boy.
He had dropped out of school and lost his job bagging groceries.
He says he tried to find the money to pay what he owed the court by knocking on neighbors' doors, offering to mow lawns or do chores.
He did not pay the $155 fine, he could not come up with the $155 he owed, and he was sentenced and ordered to jail for 3 days.
When he did not pay, a warrant was issued for his arrest.
He says there was confusion.
Court officials said paperwork was mailed to Kyle Dewitt with instructions for paying off the fine in installments.
Kyle Dewitt who as a teen moved from his grandparents' house to his mother's, to friends' houses said he never received the letter.
He was taken to jail for nonpayment.
A family member was able to pay the bail bondsman and because that payment was for $175 more than his original ticket Kyle Dewitt thought the ticket was paid.
So when he was summoned to court a few days later, the audio tape of his appearance before District Court Judge Raymond Voet makes it clear Kyle Dewitt was confident that the issue was behind him.
Court officials explained that day, the $175 was simply the fee for the bail bondsman.
None of it applied to his original fine, which had grown to more than $200.
Kyle Dewitt had come with no money, but District Court Judge Raymond Voet demanded payment that day.
The judge then sentenced Kyle Dewitt to 3 days in jail.
District Court Judge Raymond Voet says the court system can not work effectively if defendants are casual about things like paying court fees. There has to be respect for the law, he says, even on a minor violation.
District Court Judge Raymond Voet said," If I have got someone standing in front of me for something that is labeled a misdemeanor and they have failed to follow through with court orders on that am I supposed to tell the rest of the world, the rest of the law abiding citizens, that they are chumps and fools for having respected the law and respected the court's orders ? "
District Court Judge Raymond Voet is known for holding everyone to the same rules.
Last year, his own cellphone went off in the middle of an attorney's closing argument.
The judge held himself in contempt and fined himself $25, saying those are the rules.
Still others say the rules on fees are unfair because the costs mostly hurt the poor.

Davontae Sanford was only 14 years old when he was arrested for a string of murders in Michigan.
After almost 9 years in prison, his conviction was overturned when a state investigation found that the real killer had later confessed to Wayne County police and prosecutors.
Now age 23, Davontae Sanford was reunited with his family last week in Detroit but that tearful homecoming almost did not happen, because of more than $2,000 in unpaid court fines and fees he amassed while in prison, including a bill for a public defender.
Davontae Sanford's mother first got word that her son's conviction was about to be overturned and that he was coming home.
Taminko Sanford said of that day. " The family's getting excited. Everybody is coming over here, and then we hit a bombshell. I am saying to myself, I do not have this money. I can barely afford my bills. How am I going to pay this money to get him out ? I want him home. So it was like my back was against the wall. "
The bombshell was those unpaid court fees, Davontae Sanford was billed $1,500 for his public defender and an additional $1,000 in general court costs even though he was a teen in prison, with no income.
" In 2009 prison employees had responded to Davontae Sanford's cell because he had indicated he was going to make a noose out of some clothing that he had in his cell and hang himself. " said John Miller, a prosecutor in Lapeer County, Michigan explains that those costs popped up not on his original conviction but while he was in a youth detention center.
Guards in gas masks stormed into the cell, grabbed and handcuffed the despondent teen.
Davontae Sanford was charged with assault for kicking a corrections officer in the wrist and then spitting on another officer.
He was assigned a public defender and took a plea deal for misdemeanor assault.
The judge sentenced him to an additional 2 years in prison, but said the time could be erased if he paid the court fees totaling $2,500.
After it was determined that Davontae Sanford was innocent of the original murder charges in Wayne County, the sentence still stood in Lapeer County.
John Miller says his office moved to expedite the issue and Nick Holowka, the chief judge in Lapeer County who has the discretion to drop the fines and change the sentence, says he was willing to speed things up, too.
Nick Holowka says he could only do that once Davontae Sanford's lawyers set up a hearing.
While Davontae Sanford's attorneys and the judge were trying to figure out next steps, there was an unexpected solution.
Valerie Newman, an attorney who helped overturn Davontae Sanford's convictions of the Michigan State Appellate Defender Office, said that was going to take days. "I mean, I don't even really know how to articulate the absurdity of it. It is so much beyond comprehension. There was a very generous anonymous donor who knew about the case, Whose response was, I am not going to let that happen. He is not going to spend one more second locked up than he already has. I am going to pay it. "
Prison officials had already been deducting money from Davontae Sanford's prison commissary account.
The money his mother sent him so he could buy things like soap, shampoo, snacks, and make phone calls home.
Of the $2,500 he had been billed in Lapeer County, the bill was down to $2,145, a check was hand delivered to the court, and Davontae Sanford was allowed to go home.
Davontae Sanford says now that he is home he has priorities. He wants to learn to drive, go back to school and get his GED.
Davontae Sanford said of the State of Michigan. " I was in prison for a crime I did not commit, so if anybody should be paying something, it should be them. I want to get a job, eventually and you know, start becoming like, independent. "
Davontae Sanford is suing the City of Detroit and 2 Detroit Police Officers involved in his case.
The lawsuit seeks punitive and compensatory damages.
The lawsuit was filed in United States District Court in Detroit on behalf of Davontae Sanford.
Within the same week of the lawsuit filing, Davontae Sanford suffered a gunshot wound to his right leg after trying to run from the suspected shooter.
According to Detroit Police, the shooting happened at approximately 9 p.m. at the Martin Luther King Homes housing complex on the 2000 block of East Lafayette Street near Chene Street in Detroit's east side.

The poor defendants often struggle to pay those court costs, often with penalties that which typically push costs to hundreds or add up to thousands of dollars and they are sent to jail for not paying the fines and fees, even though debtors prisons were long have been outlawed in the United States nearly 200 years ago back before the Civil War.
More than 30 years ago, the United States Supreme Court made it clear: Judges cannot send defendants to jail just because they are too poor to pay their court fines.
In 1983 the United States Supreme Court had ruled against the practice. Confusion among state judges was 1 cause of the problem and many did not know that.
Defendants around the country end up in debtors prisons when they do not have the money to pay court fines and fees, even on minor infractions like traffic tickets.
Courts often ignore laws, Supreme Court rulings and protections that outlaw the equivalent of debtors prisons.
In May, the Michigan Supreme Court issued new rules telling judges to stop making impoverished defendants stay in jail if they can not pay their court fines and fees.
Now the nation's top state judges have taken a big step to end the practice of sending impoverished defendants to debtors prisons.
The National Task Force on Fines, Fees and Bail Practices issued a " bench card ", a clear set of instructions to be used by state judges across the country.
The 2 page set of guidelines, which judges can keep at their fingertips on the bench, tell judges that they are only allowed to send defendants to jail for nonpayment when they have the means to pay, but " willfully " refuse to pay.
The instructions spell out how to determine who falls below the poverty line, and how to come up with alternative sanctions, like reducing a fine, extending the time to pay it, or requiring community service instead.