“The court cannot assume that Doraville is more interested in compliance with its criminal ordinances than it is with collecting fines and fees from those who violate them,” Judge Richard Story wrote. Though Doraville denies that it issues “citations in order to bring revenue into our city,” in July, a federal judge denied their motion to dismiss Brucker and Thornton’s lawsuit. Commission on Civil Rights, among cities with at least 5,000 residents, Doraville was the sixth-most dependent on fines and fees for generating revenue. Partnering with the Institute for Justice, Brucker and Thornton filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last year, arguing that the city’s “budgetary reliance on fines, fees, and forfeiture revenues creates an incentive for its law enforcement officials…to maximize revenue.” In turn, that incentive “injects an unconstitutional financial bias” that violates their right to due process.īy turning its police and code enforcement officers into de facto tax collectors, Doraville has profited immensely. Fortunately for him, the charges were eventually dropped after Thornton informed Doraville that he couldn’t pay the lower fine. Perversely, even though he was put on probation because he couldn’t pay off the fine immediately, Thornton’s probation sentence would have also incurred a $40 monthly fee, payable to PPS. When Thornton told the city that he couldn’t pay, Doraville dropped the fine to $300, but also put him on 12 months of “pay-only” probation. An amateur woodworker, Thornton was cited, arrested, convicted, and fined $1,000 for having a “large pile of tree logs” in his backyard. Brucker had to regularly report to a probation officer at PPS, cooperate with any code enforcement official, and even avoid “alcohol intoxication.” And like other probationers, failing to abide by those conditions could risk incarceration.ĭuring that time, the city was also prosecuting her neighbor, Jeff Thornton. The town ordered her to serve six-months’ probation and pay a $100 fine to Professional Probation Services, a private probation company in contract with Doraville.Īs part of her probation. In 2016, Doraville cited, convicted, and fined Hilda Brucker for having a cracked driveway. Not only is Doraville one of the state’s worst speed traps (police have written over 40 traffic tickets a day on average, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution revealed), the city has also taken code enforcement to absurd lengths. ![]() ![]() In recent years, the Atlanta suburb of Doraville, Georgia has budgeted anywhere from 17 to 30 percent of its projected revenue from fines, fees, and forfeitures, raking in $3 million a year on average. Nor is fine revenue limited to traffic tickets. And New York City has collected well over $1 billion in court revenue per year. In Washington, D.C., the District generated $304 in fine revenue per capita-one of the highest amounts for a city of its size. Exorbitant fines in Chicago, including from its notorious impound program, garnered more than a tenth of its general fund revenue. Though most of the jurisdictions are tiny speed traps, several major metropolises made the list too. Yet those figures are actually “underestimates.” For its analysis, Governing only included municipalities that collected at least $100,000 in court revenue, while others were dropped due to scarce data and unresponsive local governments. Since there was considerable overlap between the two categories, Governing’s report includes 840 different jurisdictions in total.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |