"Poor clients pay just to apply for a public defender
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NEWARK, N.J. — Newly elected Mayor Ras J. Baraka, a former high school principal and son of the late poet Amiri Baraka, ran on promises of compassionate reform. He would strengthen the public schools, alleviate poverty and use community policing to bring peace to his majority-African American hometown. But in November, a few months into his term, Baraka quietly helped pass a law that criminal justice advocates say will hurt the city’s most vulnerable: He quadrupled the fee Newark Municipal Court can charge poor defendants applying for free legal representation.
The fee hike, from $50 to $200, is the latest notch in the national trend of charging “user fees” to fund struggling courts. The Sixth Amendment and a long line of Supreme Court cases promise a lawyer to every person accused of a crime, even those who cannot pay. In practice, though, indigent clients often do pay for their attorneys, particularly in lower-level courts.
Around the same time as the fee increase in Newark, New Jersey’s superior courts raised a raft of fees to file and respond to civil cases. And the Office of the Public Defender, or OPD, which works in the superior courts, announced that it would charge a flat fee per case, instead of an hourly sum, to encourage more clients to pay.
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New Jersey’s local courts, like those across the United States, have been underfunded for decades.
The budget gap is partly attributable to the war on drugs. When the United States resolved, in the 1980s, to pursue an aggressive policy of crime and punishment, it funneled lavish resources to police forces and prisons. But as for the step between enforcement and incarceration — that is, the courts — “They forgot the middle,” said Tim Young, director of the Ohio’s office of the public defender. As a consequence, judicial systems became dependent on fees and fines.
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Over the past few years, criminal justice advocates and journalists have uncovered a trend of “cash register” courts more focused on padding local budgets than carrying out judicial functions. Municipal courts in states including Alabama, California, Mississippi, Missouri and Texas have pursued a fiscal strategy of offender-funded justice, cutting back on indigent defense, increasing fees, fines and interest rates, hiring for-profit companies to collect debts and privileging jail time over community service for those too poor to pay."
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Representation in the justice system is a major problem in the income inequality debate. See Diamon, Jamie.
