Jailing of poor who can’t pay fines at issue

Colorado lawmakers are trying to close a loophole that critics contend guts legislation intended to bar the jailing of poor people who can’t pay fines for low-level offenses.

The House this month passed a bill that supporters say will keep the poor from crowding jails across the state for inability to pay their court fines.

House Bill 1311, sponsored by Rep. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, comes up for consideration Wednesday in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Salazar charged during a legislative committee hearing last month in the House that municipal judges are thwarting the intent of legislation signed into law two years ago. He said he’s so outraged that he might even push to lift Colorado statutes that grant municipal judges immunity from lawsuits.

“The scofflaws aren’t poor people who can’t pay,” Salazar said when the bill came up in the House Judiciary Committee last month. “The scofflaws are the municipalities still engaging in debtors’ prisons. We are a society of laws, and the U.S. Supreme Court and Colorado Supreme Court have already said debtors’ prisons are unconstitutional.”

Some judges have fired back. Richard Weinberg, the presiding judge of the municipal courts of Aurora, told legislators last month during one legislative hearing that Salazar’s proposed fix “allows any person given a sentence to ignore their responsibilities for their criminal acts” and discriminates against those in upper-income levels.

Legislation that Salazar persuaded the legislature to pass in 2014 made clear that municipal judges weren’t supposed to jail an indigent defendant for failure to pay court fines. It specified that jailings could occur only after a court hearing determined the fines weren’t an undue hardship.

Lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, which have been combing municipal court cases throughout the state for months, said municipal judges have ended up spreading payments out over several months for those who can’t pay in full.

But the ACLU says judges have put in place a new hurdle for the poor by requiring those who can’t pay to show up in court for each failed payment date. An automatic arrest warrant for failure to appear in court is issued if the scheduled payment isn’t made in full. Those warrants come with new costs, up to $100 each time in Aurora, and also actual time spent in jail when the defendant is picked up by police.

House Bill 1311 would put a stop to such automatic warrants. Instead, the judges would have to schedule a court hearing for contempt for failure to pay the fine. At the contempt hearing, the defendant would be entitled to a defense lawyer. A jailing could occur only upon a finding that the court fees weren’t an undue hardship and a finding that the defendant intentionally was refusing to pay when he had adequate resources.

James Fisher, 52, told legislators in committee last month that he received original fines of $703 after pleading guilty in 2012 to two separate open-container summonses and a citation for no proof of insurance.

He said he has paid $1,500 — more than double what he originally owed — and has been jailed three times for failure to appear in court or pay on time. He said he still owes $860, and that a new warrant has been issued for his arrest.

The fees keep escalating, Fisher said, because he can’t always afford to pay his scheduled payment, which automatically results in a warrant for his arrest for failure to appear. He said he has showed up at the court several times to make a partial payment, only to have another warrant issued for failure to appear anyway. Going to court is an all-day affair, which puts him at risk of losing the temporary construction work he needs to survive, Fisher added.

“I shouldn’t be arrested just because I’m poor,” Fisher said. “If I go to jail again, I’ll lose my job, which is the only thing keeping me off the streets right now. Paying double for the original fine and being arrested three times should be more than enough punishment for what I’ve done, but Aurora just won’t stop coming after me for every penny that I have.”