Tag Archives: court

How Many Ways Can The City Of Ferguson Slap You With Court Fees? We Counted.

by LanCulpepper Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Over 100 people showed up on Tuesday night at the first Ferguson City Council meeting since Michael Brown’s killing, and unreasonable court fees were a major complaint. Ferguson officials proposed scaling back the myriad ways small-time offenders can end up paying big bucks—or worse. Community activists are optimistic about the proposed changes, but as it turns out, imposing punitive court fines on poor residents is a major source of income for a number of St. Louis County municipalities.

How bad is the current system? Say you’re a low-income Ferguson resident who’s been hit with a municipal fine for rolling through a stop sign, driving without insurance, or neglecting to subscribe to the city’s trash collection service. A look at the municipal codes in Ferguson and nearby towns reveals how these fines and fees can quickly stack up.

To start, you might show up on time for your court date, only to find that your hearing is already over. How is that possible? According to a Ferguson court employee who spoke with St. Louis-based legal aid watchdog ArchCity Defenders, the bench routinely starts hearing cases 30 minutes before the appointed time and even locks the doors as early as five minutes after the official hour, hitting defendants who arrive just slightly late with an additional charge of $120-130.

Or you may arrive to find yourself faced with an impossible choice: Skip your court date or leave your children unattended in the parking lot. Non-defendants, such as children, are permitted by law to accompany defendants in the courtroom, but a survey by the presiding judge of the St. Louis County Circuit Court found that 37 percent of local courts don’t allow it.

Coming to court has its own pitfalls, but not the ones many people fear. It’s a common misconception among Ferguson residents—especially those without attorneys—that if you show up without money to pay your fine, you’ll go to jail. In fact, you can’t be put behind bars for inability to pay a fine, but you can be sent to jail for failure to appear in court (and accrue a $125 fee). If you missed your court date, the court will likely issue a warrant for your arrest, which comes with a fee of its own:

At this point, you owe your initial fine, plus fines for failure to appear in court and the arrest warrant. Thomas Harvey, executive director of ArchCity Defenders, explains that if you’re arrested, your bail will likely equal the sum of these fines. Ferguson Municipal Court is only in session three days a month, so if you can’t meet bail, you might sit in jail for days until the next court session—which, you guessed it, will cost you.

Once you finally appear in court and receive your verdict, your IOU is likely to go up again.

Can’t pay all at once? No problem! Opt for a payment plan, and come to court once a month with an installment. But if you miss a date, expect another $125 “failure to appear” fine, plus another warrant for your arrest.

Court fines for minor infractions tend to snowball. For example, drivers accumulate points for speeding, rolling through stop signs, or driving without insurance. You can pay to wipe your record, which is pricey. If you can’t afford to, and rack up enough points, your license will be suspended and your insurance costs will probably jump. Need to get to work? If you’re caught driving with a suspended license, your court fines increase, you gain more points, and your suspension is lengthened. That’s how rolling through a stop sign could end up costing you your job, messing up your degree plans, and more.

In a county like St. Louis, which consists of 81 different municipal court systems, it’s easy to end up with fines and outstanding warrants in multiple towns. Harvey has seen his clients bounce from jail to jail, and says there’s even a local name for this: the “muni-shuffle.”

“Every handful of months, there’s some awful thing that happens as a result of someone being arrested on multiple warrants,” says Harvey. Last year, a 24-year-old man in Jennings, another city in St. Louis County, hung himself after he couldn’t get out of jail for outstanding traffic warrants. “They can’t get out, and they know they’re not going to get out,” says Harvey. In Ferguson, he explains, residents are caught in cycles of debt that stem from three main infractions: driving without insurance, driving with a suspended license, and driving without registration.

So what happens to all that cash? In Ferguson, as in thousands of municipalities across the country, it goes toward paying city officials, funding city services, and otherwise keeping the wheels of local government turning. In fact, fines and court fees are the city’s second-largest revenue source. Last year, Ferguson issued 3 warrants for every household—25,000 warrants in a city of 21,000 people.

“Ferguson isn’t an outlier,” says Alexes Harris, sociology professor at University of Washington and author of the upcoming book Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Permanent Punishment for Poor Peopleâ&#128;&#139;. Similar measures play out in jurisdictions across the country. “All you have to do is show up in court and watch what happens.”

The good news is that this week, under pressure from local activists, the Ferguson City Council announced plans to eliminate some of the most punitive fees, including the $125 failure to appear fee and the $50 fee to cancel a warrant. Of course, nothing is set to change elsewhere in St. Louis County. But eliminating some of the most egregious fees in one town, says Harvey, is “huge progress.”

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How Many Ways Can The City Of Ferguson Slap You With Court Fees? We Counted.

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Grisly New Details Emerge in Probe of Botched Oklahoma Execution

by DemetriaDLW Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has famously referred to execution by lethal injection as an “enviable…quiet death.” Clayton Lockett’s death was anything but quiet.

In April, Lockett’s execution in Oklahoma was badly botched and brought new scrutiny to the problems with lethal injection. The state’s Republican governor, Mary Fallin, ordered the Oklahoma Office of Public Safety (OPS) to conduct an internal inquiry into the execution. A summary was released Thursday.

The investigation, conducted largely by a bunch of investigators working for the state highway patrol, didn’t produce much new information. The report mostly absolves the state of responsibility, even as it further documents the torture inflicted on Lockett before he died. It sheds no light on the effectiveness of the new, controversial, and experimental drugs used to kill Lockett—drugs that had been predicted to cause a torturous death.

But buried in the report are some of the rarely seen minutiae involved in the machinery of death, the small absurdities of a government-sanctioned killing—the pre-execution shower, the mental-health consultations, and suicide prevention efforts—all directed at someone about to die. And inside the report is the story of a real dead man walking who clearly didn’t view lethal injection as the enviable death Scalia thinks it is.

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Grisly New Details Emerge in Probe of Botched Oklahoma Execution

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BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

by ChristoSprouse Posted on September 4, 2014

Mother Jones

News of this morning’s federal court decision against BP broke as I was aboard a 40-foot oyster boat in the Louisiana delta, just off the coast of Empire, a suburb of New Orleans.

The reaction: stunned silence. Then a bit of optimism.

“This is huge,” said John Tesvich, chair of the Louisiana Oyster Task Force, his industry’s main lobby group in the state. “They are going to have to pay a lot more.” Standing on his boat, the “Croatian Pride,” en route to survey oyster farms, he added: “We want to see justice. We hope that this money goes to helping cure some of the environmental issues in this state.”

On Thursday, a federal judge in New Orleans found that the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster—in which the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 people and spilling millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf—was caused by BP’s “willful misconduct” and “gross negligence.”

Tesvich says he’s seen a drastic decline in his company’s oyster production since then—company profits down 15 to 20 percent and oyster yields slashed by 30 percent. He says he’s suspicious that this new decision will force the kind of action from local politicians needed to clean up the Gulf once-and-for-all. The politicians in Louisiana, he says, “haven’t been the best environmental stewards.”

BP’s own reaction to the news has been fast and pointed. “BP strongly disagrees with the decisionâ&#128;&#139;,” the company said in a statement on Thursday, published to its website. “BP believes that an impartial view of the record does not support the erroneous conclusion reached by the District Court.”

The company said it would immediately appeal the decision.

With the fourth anniversary of the busted well’s final sealing coming up in a couple weeks, BP has been pushing back aggressively against the company’s critics. On Wednesday night—just hours before the court’s ruling—Geoff Morrell, the company’s vice president of US communications, spoke in New Orleans at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, and blamed the media and activists for BP’s rough ride.

The company’s efforts to clean up the spill have been obscured, he said, by the ill-intentioned efforts of “opportunistic” environmentalists, shoddy science, and the sloppy work of environmental journalists (much to the chagrin of his audience, hundreds of environmental journalists).

“It’s clear that the apocalypse forecast did not come to pass,” he said. “The environmental impacts of the spill were not as far-reaching or long-lasting as many predicted.”

Back in 2010, BP’s then-CEO Tony Hayward lamented—a month after the explosion—that he wanted his “life back.” He didn’t find much sympathy at the time. Within a couple months, he resigned out of the spotlight (with a $930,000 petroleum parachute). But his flub didn’t retire so easily, and it became emblematic of BP’s astonishing capacity for tone-deafness, something Morrell seemed intent on continuing Wednesday.

Morrell said that while “impolitic” remarks had been made by BP officials in the past, the spill’s aftermath has been “tough on all of us.”

I can only imagine.

I can faithfully report that no rotten tomatoes were hurled during Morrell’s talk, and grumbles and cynical chuckles were kept to a polite murmur. But the response on Twitter was more free-flowing:

Yup, that last one is true.

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BP Lashes Out at Journalists and “Opportunistic” Environmentalists

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

by SantosSolis Posted on August 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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The Obama administration has fought a years-long court battle to force longtime New York Times national security correspondent James Risen to reveal the source for a story in his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. Risen may soon serve jail time for refusing to out his source. The fight has drawn attention to Obama’s less-than-stellar track record on press freedom—in a recent interview, Risen called the president “the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation.” But lost in the ruckus are the details of what Risen revealed. Here’s what has the government so upset.

In State of War, Risen revealed a secret CIA operation, code-named Merlin, that was intended to undermine the Iranian nuclear program. The plan—originally approved by president Bill Clinton, but later embraced by George W. Bush—was to pass flawed plans for a trigger system for a nuclear weapon to Iran in the hopes of derailing the country’s nuclear program. “It was one of the greatest engineering secrets in the world,” Risen wrote in State of War, “providing the solution to one of a handful of problems that separated nuclear powers such as the United States and Russia from the rogue countries like Iran that were desperate to join the nuclear club but had so far fallen short.”

The flaws in the trigger system were supposed to be so well hidden that the blueprints would lead Iranian scientists down the wrong path for years. But Merlin’s frontman, a Russian nuclear scientist and defector then on the CIA’s payroll, spotted the flaws almost immediately. On the day of the handoff in Vienna in winter 2000, the Russian, not wanting to burn a bridge with the Iranians, included an apologetic note with his delivery, explaining that the design had some problems. Shortly after receiving the plans, one member of the Iranian mission changed his travel plans and flew back to Tehran, presumably with the blueprints—and the note—in hand. Merlin did not wreck the Iranian nuclear program—in fact, Risen wrote, the operation could have accelerated it.

In a sworn affidavit filed in 2011, and in a recently rejected appeal to the US Supreme Court, Risen has argued that his reporting served the public good. Published at a time when military action in Iran seemed possible, State of Fear revealed how much of the effort to gather information on Iran’s nuclear capability was not just shoddy but dangerous—even, in the case of Operation Merlin, helping Iran get closer to building a nuclear weapon.

The Bush administration did not see it that way. In 2008, Bush’s Justice Department subpoenaed Risen, demanding that he reveal his source—or face jail time for contempt of court. After taking office in 2009, the Obama administration renewed the Bush-era subpoena and continued to try to identify and prosecute Risen’s source. Justice Department staff believe they know who the source was—an ex-CIA operations officer named Jeffrey Sterling, who was previously an on-the-record source for Risen—but they want Risen to confirm their hunch and fill in a few details. In legal filings, Justice Department lawyers have called Risen a witness to “serious crimes that implicate the national security of the United States” and argued that “there are few scenarios where the United States’ interests in securing information is more profound and compelling than in a criminal prosecution like this one.”

If Risen is called to court to testify but fails to show up or refuses to talk, he’s likely to become the first reporter since Judith Miller in 2005 to be sentenced to jail time for refusing to divulge a source.

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Obama May Soon Send This Reporter to Jail. Here Are the Embarrassing Secrets He Exposed.

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Quote of the Day: Wall Street Judge Left With "Nothing But Sour Grapes"

by ElizbethCardwel Posted on August 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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A few years ago, federal district judge Jed Rakoff refused to approve an SEC settlement with Citigroup over charges that they had deliberately offloaded toxic mortgage securities into a special fund so that they could make money by betting against their own customers. Rakoff objected partly because he thought the SEC’s proposed fine was too small—”pocket change,” he called it—but mostly because there was no public reckoning of what Citigroup had done. Not only weren’t they required to admit wrongdoing, they weren’t required even to admit the bare facts of what they had done.

Sadly for Rakoff—and for the public—an appeals court overruled him, basically saying that the SEC had full discretion to reach any settlement it desired, and the judge’s only real role was to make sure it wasn’t tainted by collusion or corruption. Earlier this week, Rakoff backed off:

They who must be obeyed have spoken, and this Court’s duty is to faithfully fulfill their mandate.

….Nonetheless, this Court fears that, as a result of the Court of Appeal’s decision, the settlements reached by governmental regulatory bodies and enforced by the judiciary’s contempt powers will in practice be subject to no meaningful oversight whatsoever. But it would be a dereliction of duty for this Court to seek to evade the dictates of the Court of Appeals. That Court has now fixed the menu, leaving this Court with nothing but sour grapes.

Quite so, and the SEC’s long tradition of issuing wrist slaps to big Wall Street firms—and withholding all the details of their corruption from the public—is now safe once again. Apparently that kind of thing is only for the little people.

Of course, Congress could intervene, giving the SEC more manpower and demanding more accountability, but that’s not going to happen either. After all, sometimes people say mean things about Wall Street firms. Surely that’s punishment enough?

Via Michael Hiltzik, who has more at the link.

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Quote of the Day: Wall Street Judge Left With "Nothing But Sour Grapes"

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Arizona Executioners Had To Use 15 Doses of Lethal Drugs Before Inmate Finally Died

by BrittanM91 Posted on August 2, 2014

Mother Jones

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Documents released Friday afternoon in the case of Arizona’s botched execution of Joseph Wood—who gasped for air and struggled, according to witnesses, repeatedly during the two-hour process—show that executioners used 15 separate doses of a new drug cocktail before Wood finally died. Lawyers had warned that the combination of 50 milligrams hydromorphone (a pain killer) and 50 milligrams of midazolam (a sedative) was rife with potential problems. (The state also has a long history of failing to follow its own protocol.) The documents suggest they were right.

“Instead of the one dose as required under the protocol, ADC injected 15 separate doses of the drug combination, resulting in the most prolonged execution in recent memory,” said Dale Baich, Wood’s lawyer. “This is why an independent investigation by a non-governmental authority is necessary.”

Ohio used a similar drug cocktail in January to execute Dennis McGuire, who gasped and snorted for 25 minutes before finally succumbing, the longest execution in Ohio history. Arizona apparently increased the dosage of midazolam from what Ohio had used, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any better results.

When officials in Ohio and elsewhere first expressed their intent to experiment with the midazolam/hydromorphone combination, experts predicted, as Mother Jones‘ Molly Redden reported, that little was known about how the new drug combinations would work in executions. She wrote:

Jonathan Groner, a professor of clinical surgery at the Ohio State University College of Medicine who has written extensively on the death penalty, says effects of a hydromorphone overdose include an extreme burning sensation, seizures, hallucination, panic attacks, vomiting, and muscle pain or spasms. David Waisel, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School, who has testified extensively on capital-punishment methods, adds that a hydromorphone overdose could result in soft tissue collapse—the same phenomenon that causes sleep apnea patients to jerk awake—that an inmate who had been paralyzed would be unable to clear by jerking or coughing. Instead, he could feel as though he were choking to death.

Because hydromorphone is not designed to kill a person, Groner says, there are no clinical guidelines for how to give a lethal overdose. “You’re basically relying on the toxic side effects to kill people while guessing at what levels that occurs,” he explains.

The new Arizona documents suggest that these assessments were dead on.

State officials are using new drug combinations because pharmaceutical companies have been refusing to sell or export the drugs traditionally used in executions. The US has seen a shortage of those drugs for several years now, and death penalty states have gone to increasingly desperate measures to kill their condemned, everything from illegally importing the old drugs to buying them from dubious compounding pharmacies. Arizona illustrated the latest gambit—using new combinations of other available drugs, something critics have called an unethical human experiment.

States have also gone to great lengths to hide information about the drugs they’re using in executions and how they’re getting them. In Arizona, Wood was just the latest of many death row inmates who have tried and failed to force states to be more transparent. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Wood in late July and agreed that he had a right to know how he was going to die. But the US Supreme Court overruled that decision and allowed the execution to go forward.

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Arizona Executioners Had To Use 15 Doses of Lethal Drugs Before Inmate Finally Died

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Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

by CoyHargrove Posted on July 28, 2014

Mother Jones

What’s the hottest ticket in the global bond market right now? That’s right: Argentine bonds. They’re on a tear. But why? Didn’t Argentina just lose—once and for all—its court case against vulture funds who own old Argentine bonds and are refusing to accept partial payment of the kind that everyone else accepted after Argentina’s default a decade ago?

Why yes, they did lose. Argentina now has to pay the vulture funds—which is politically unthinkable for any Argentine politician who wants to avoid being tarred and feathered—or else it has to default on all its bonds, including the restructured “exchange” bonds that it issued in 2005. So why are these exchange bonds becoming more valuable? Argentina has always been willing to pay those bonds, so it’s not as if the court ruling has made default less likely. The risk of default was already close to nil. So what’s up?

Felix Salmon, having gotten tired of financial journalists offering up bizarre theories to explain this, tells us today that it’s probably all simpler than it seems. In fact, the odds of default have gotten higher, just as logic dictates, but this might actually be a good thing for bondholders. Normally, he points out, there’s no upside to bonds: you get the coupon payment, but you never get anything more. In Argentina’s case, however, that might not be true.

First off, there’s something called a RUFO clause. This means that if Argentina does eventually settle with the vulture funds, it has to offer the same deal to all the other bondholders.

Obviously, Argentina doesn’t have the money to pay out the exchange bondholders in full according to that clause. But if Argentina is paying out billions of dollars to vultures who deserve much less than they’re getting, and if those payments create a massive parallel legal obligation to the bondholders who cooperated with the country and did everything they asked, then it’s not unreasonable to expect that Argentina might end up paying something to the exchange bondholders, if doing so would wipe out any RUFO obligations.

Then there are interest payments:

The second way that exchange bondholders could get more than 100 cents on the dollar is, paradoxically, if there is a default. The minute that Argentina goes into arrears on its coupon payments, the clock starts ticking. From that day onwards — and actually, that day has been and gone already — bondholders are owed not only those coupon payments but interest on those coupon payments. And the interest accrues at the standard statutory rate of 8% — a massive number, these days.

So there you have it: a paradoxical case in which bonds might be viewed as more valuable if the odds of default are higher. Salmon admits that he’s just speculating here, since no one knows for sure why the market is so hot for Argentine bonds in the wake of Argentina losing its court case. But this is at least a reasonable guess. And a fascinating one.

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Why on Earth Are Argentine Bonds So Hot Right Now?

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Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

by IrvingHerndon Posted on July 14, 2014

Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

By

Nicholas A. Tonelli

Blowing up mountains so that their coal-filled bellies can be stripped of their climate-changing innards doesn’t just ruin Southern Appalachian forests. It also poisons the region’s streams, as fragments of rock and soil previously known as mountaintops get dumped into valleys. A government-led study published two weeks ago concluded that this pollution is poisoning waterways, leading to “fewer species, lower abundances, and less biomass.”

Concern about just this kind of water pollution is why the EPA stepped in five years ago using its Clean Water Act mandate to boost environmental oversight of mountaintop-removal mining, creating a joint review process with the Army Corps of Engineers to help that agency assess mining proposals under the Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

The EPA can’t really do anything these days without the attorneys of polluters and the states that they pollute crying foul in court about “agency overreach.” So it was with the EPA’s 2009 “Enhanced Coordination Process.” The National Mining Association, West Virginia, and Kentucky filed suit, and a federal court sided with them. But on Friday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia reversed that decision, issuing a 3-0 ruling in favor of the EPA. The Charleston Gazette reports:

In a significant victory for the Obama administration’s coal policies, a federal appeals court on Friday upheld U.S. Environmental Protection Agency initiatives aimed at reducing water pollution from mountaintop removal mining operations. …

“The EPA did its job when it directed its staff to finally follow the law and science, and start protecting Appalachian waters and communities from mountaintop removal mining, which is associated with higher cancer, birth defects and early death for people living nearby,” said Emma Cheuse, an attorney with Earthjustice, which represented citizen groups who sided with the EPA in the case. “The coal industry continually fights for free rein to blow up mountains and dump waste all over Appalachia, and we’re glad to see clean water and healthy communities triumph today.” …

Coalfield elected officials responded with statements harshly criticizing the EPA and the court ruling, and promising legislation that would try to block the EPA from more closely scrutinizing mining operations.

The trade association and states also claimed in their lawsuit that the EPA erred in 2011 when it issued recommendations regarding the need for greater oversight by state and federal staff of mining permits that could affect salinity levels in rivers. The appeals court slapped them down on this point as well.


Source
Temporal changes in taxonomic and functional diversity of fish assemblages downstream from mountaintop mining, Freshwater Science
Appeals court upholds EPA’s mountaintop removal crackdown, The Charleston Gazette

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another court victory for EPA — this time on mountaintop-removal rules

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

by KieranNorthey Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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In his majority opinion in the recent Hobby Lobby case, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito took pains to frame the ruling, exempting companies from complying with Obamacare’s contraceptive mandate if it violated the religious beliefs of their owners, as a narrow one. But gay and civil rights groups have long warned that a decision permitting such a religious exemption could have broad ramifications, potentially allowing employers to discriminate against gays. Now, their fears may be coming to pass.

“What we’ve seen since last week’s decision came down is that opponents of LGBT equality have pushed a misreading of that decision as having broadly endorsed discrimination against people, including LGBT people in the workplace,” says Ian Thompson, a legislative representative for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, told Mother Jones that the Hobby Lobby ruling “opens the door for corporations to discriminate against anyone that doesn’t look, sound, or share the religious beliefs that they do. This isn’t a business agenda; it’s an extreme social agenda and it is deeply unpopular with the American people.”

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The Legacy of the Hobby Lobby Case: Protecting Anti-Gay Discrimination?

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This Is the Democratic Plan to Reverse the Hobby Lobby Decision

by MiloTQBHoozqo Posted on July 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised “to do something” about the Supreme Court’s recent Hobby Lobby decision. Now two members of his caucus say they are preparing a bill that would reverse some of the controversial aspects of last week’s decision.

Take it away, TPM:

The legislation will be sponsored by Sens. Patty Murray (D-WA) and Mark Udall (D-CO). According to a summary reviewed by TPM, it prohibits employers from refusing to provide health services, including contraception, to their employees if required by federal law. It clarifies that the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling against the mandate, and all other federal laws don’t permit businesses to opt out of the Obamacare requirement.
…

This bill will restore the original legal guarantee that women have access to contraceptive coverage through their employment-based insurance plans and will protect coverage of other health services from employer objections as well, according to the summary.

This is all well and good, but unfortunately this bill will never survive a cloture vote in the Senate; even if it did, it would be dead on arrival in the House of Representatives. The only way that Hobby Lobby stands even a chance of being overturned legislatively is if John Boehner is forced to hand over the Speaker’s gavel to a Democrat. That’s probably something someone at the DCCC should remind people of as we head into the midterms.

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This Is the Democratic Plan to Reverse the Hobby Lobby Decision

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