Arrested but innocent? There’s a fee for that

WASHINGTON • Corey Statham had $46 when he was arrested in Ramsey County, Minn., and charged with disorderly conduct. He was released two days later, and the charges were dismissed.

But the county kept $25 as a “booking fee.” It returned the remaining $21 on a debit card subject to an array of fees. It cost Statham $7.25 to withdraw what was left of his money.

The U.S. Supreme Court will soon consider whether to hear Statham’s challenge to Ramsey County’s fundraising efforts, part of a national trend to extract fees and fines from people enmeshed in the criminal justice system.

Kentucky bills people held in its jails for the costs of incarceration, even if all charges are later dismissed. In Colorado, five towns raise more than 30 per cent of their revenue from traffic tickets and fines. In Ferguson, Mo., “city officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity,” a Justice Department report found last year.

An unusual coalition of civil rights organizations, criminal defence lawyers and conservative and libertarian groups have challenged these sorts of policies, saying they confiscate private property without constitutional protections and lock poor people into a cycle of fines, debts and jail.

The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear a separate challenge to a Colorado law that makes it hard for criminal defendants whose convictions were overturned to obtain refunds of fines and restitution. That case, Nelson v. Colorado, will be argued Jan. 9.

The Colorado law requires people who want their money back to file a separate lawsuit and prove their innocence by clear and convincing evidence.

The sums at issue are smaller in Ramsey County. But they are taken from people who have merely been arrested.

Some of them will never be charged with a crime. Some will have the charges dismissed. Others will be tried but acquitted.

It is all the same to the county, which does not return the $25 booking fee even if the arrest does not lead to a conviction. Instead, it requires people like Statham to submit evidence to prove they are entitled to get their money back.

When the case was argued last year before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit in St. Paul, a lawyer for the county acknowledged its process was in tension with the presumption of innocence.

“There is some legwork involved,” the lawyer, Jason Hiveley said, but noted it is possible for blameless people to get their $25 back. “They can do it as soon as they have the evidence that they haven’t been found guilty.”

The legwork proved too much for Statham. He never got his $25 back.

Statham is represented by Michael A. Carvin, a prominent conservative lawyer who has argued Supreme Court cases challenging the Affordable Care Act and fees charged by public unions.

Carvin said the county’s motives were not rooted in solicitude for the people it had arrested. “Revenuestarved local governments are increasingly turning toward fees like Ramsey County’s in order to bridge their budgetary gaps,” he wrote in a Supreme Court brief. “But the unilateral decision of a single police officer cannot possibly justify summarily confiscating money.”

Michael Carvin