Secret hearings with no transcripts
In more news from the Moral Squalor Files – the ACLU is suing an Arkansas county for setting up a debtors’ prison.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the City of Sherwood, its district court judge, and Pulaski County. The suit claims they’re violating a person’s due process rights, and preying on the poor, by creating a never-ending spiral in hot check cases.
This lawsuit claims that the Sherwood courts are trapping people into a never-ending spiral of repetitive court proceedings and ever-increasing debt, adding it’s been happening for the past 25 years or so.
Squalid though we are, we don’t allow debtors’ prisons.
“In this country, you cannot be jailed if you cannot pay your debts. That’s called debtors’ prison and that’s something we did away with some 200 years ago,” said Rita Sklar, ACLU of Arkansas Executive Director.
The suit is on behalf of four people who were convicted of “hot check crimes.”
“A single bounced check written 10 years ago for $15 can be leveraged into a debt of thousands and thousands of dollars in fines and fees for inability to pay the original check and then inability to pay the payments that were set up,” added Sklar.
It goes on to say the hot check court hearings held every Thursday are held in secret, with no transcripts available and closed off to the public. It also adds that hot check defendants are unknowingly signing a waiver of counsel because they’re told they must fill the form out to enter the courtroom.
Well that doesn’t sound at all suspect.
You can read the lawsuit on the article.
This is in Arcane-saw, right? Nowhere else?
Reminds me of when I had a credit card that played games with me. They would hold my check until after the due date, then charge me a late fee. Then, one month when I paid it early, they charged me a late fee, because they decided to apply it to the previous month (which had already been paid). When I finally sent them a check for the entire balance, they sent me a new monthly bill for $25, because they held the check and charged me a late fee. This could have gone on forever if I hadn’t gotten on the phone with them and told them I would not be paying that late fee, or any future bills, since I had paid off my bill with a check mailed well before the due date. They never sent me another bill, and I was fortunate that they didn’t turn that over to collection, or I could have been in the same boat. At the time, I was extremely underemployed, and could barely manage, and took pride in being able to get my bills paid on time in spite of it.
These circumstances prey on the poor, obviously. We seem to have turned around that old dictum (I think it was Jesse James) of why he robs banks: because that’s where the money is. Now we seem to want to get all tax money and everything else from the poor. Then we can transfer it all upwards to the rich, where all money belongs…at least in our current mode of thinking about capitalism. Reminds me of a line in the movie Madwoman of Chaillot, where one extremely rich character pockets a bill found lying on the sidewalk; when asked if it is his, he says “All money is mine”.
I don’t understand what the point of this grotesque process is. In the past working class people convicted of minor crimes were transported to the colonies as slave labor, the agenda was obvious, so again, what’s the point?
If the waiver of counsel form is misrepresented to the defendant, ie claimed by the court admin as an entirely different document, why is it legally enforceable?
I don’t understand it either. It looks like sheer sadism.