All 50 states impose court fees on defendants. Some states jail people for being unable—that’s “unable,” not “unwilling”—to pay fines. That used to be the case in Georgia, Missouri, and Alabama—until courts set them straight. Now a federal district court in another conservative state, Louisiana, has also eliminated that barbaric practice.
Judge Sarah Vance found “undisputed evidence” of "a policy or practice of not inquiring into criminal defendants' ability to pay before those individuals are imprisoned for nonpayment of court debts” in Orleans Parish. Fees and fines collected by those judges, by the way, went into a fund they control.
Then Vance found that the judges’ refusal to "provide a neutral forum for determination of such persons' ability to pay is unconstitutional." From now on, judges must provide a neutral forum in which defendants can “plead poverty,” or show they can’t pay. That’s a big deal.
If a defendant can prove they’ve tried to pay and/or can’t pay, they’ve got the protection of the Supreme Court, which described imprisoning people for their inability to pay without more—that is, without a valid reason that the person should be imprisoned—“would be little more than punishing a person for his poverty.”
This is a case where the holding’s worth reading:
If the [defendant] could not pay despite sufficient bona fide efforts to acquire the resources to do so, the court must consider alternative measures of punishment other than imprisonment. Only if alternative measures are not adequate to meet the State's interests in punishment and deterrence may the court imprison a probationer who has made sufficient bona fide efforts to pay. To do otherwise would deprive the probationer of his conditional freedom simply because, through no fault of his own, he cannot pay the fine. Such a deprivation would be contrary to the fundamental fairness required by the Fourteenth Amendment.
What’s sad about this victory—and it is a victory—is that rather than advancing the law, it’s reminding courts to follow the law.