To reverse an Ohio trend in which courts are sentencing individuals who can’t afford fees and court costs to probation or jail, the Ohio Supreme Court agreed this week to instruct all of its judges that they cannot jail defendants for failure to pay fees and court costs, nor for their inability to afford a criminal fine.
An April American Civil Liberties Union report documented in Ohio what has become an increasing trend around the country — therevival of so-called debtors’ prisons in which those who cannot pay fines face incarceration. The ACLU found that judges were illegally imposing jail time on the poor in two ways: First, they were threatening criminal punishment for those who don’t pay a non-criminal fee, such as court costs, a civil fine, or other fees. Second, they were failing to assess whether an individual ordered to pay a criminal fine has the ability to pay that fine before sentencing them to jail time — a violation of a 30-year-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
A new “bench card” that the Ohio Supreme Court will disseminate to all judges explains that imposing either one of these sentences is illegal. “An offender CANNOT be held in contempt of court for refusal to pay fines,” the memo states. “Accordingly, unpaid fines and/or court costs may neither be a condition of probation, nor grounds for an extension or violation of probation.”
At one point in time the city of Philadelphia was a pretty enlightened city. But the rest of Pennsylvania has always been a intellectual backwater.
Hey, Pittsburgh isn’t exactly chopped liver.
The middle of the commonwealth, in the immortal words of James Carville, is Alabama…
Thank god someone in the judiciary made it to the 20th Century.