Just Being Accused of Crime in Florida Can Cost You

[The Straight Story]

Just Being Accused of Crime in Florida Can Cost You

Florida has earned a reputation for relying on “cash register justice” to help pay for its court system, according to a new report by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. What this amounts to is individuals—both those accused and convicted of crimes—paying more and more fines that cover the costs of Florida’s legal system instead of the legislature paying for these expenses out of the state budget.

“Legal financial obligations” (LFOs) is the official term used to describe the fees, which can range from the cost of applying for a public defender to reimbursing a county or city for prosecuting a convicted criminal.

The Brennan Center found that Florida lawmakers have approved more than 20 new categories of LFOs since 1996 “without considering the effects of the new LFOs and without examining whether cumulative debt promotes recidivism or otherwise hinders reentry into society for those convicted of crimes.”

Furthermore, state officials have removed many of the exemptions that once kept the poor from having to pay these fees, adding another burden onto the most economically-disadvantaged of society.

Florida allows private debt collection firms to charge up to 40% extra to collect unpaid court debts.

http://www.allgov.com/Controversies/ViewNews/Just_Being_Accused_of_Crime_in_Florida_Can_Cost_You_100328

[sakabatou]

1. *facepalm*

[LiberalFighter]

2. Florida needs to be avoided at all cost.

[bullimiami]

4. once a wonderland now a republican hell-hole.

[Froward69]

11. adding to the List

Utah
Wyoming
Oklahoma
Texas
the city of Colorado Springs
and now Florida.

[SargeUNN]

21. Sadly you can add Arizona to the list

Arizona who gave us such slugs as McCain, Kyl, Trent Franks, Joe Arpaio and many more.

[Froward69]

12. Dupe

D'oh!

[Solly Mack]

3. k/r

[pdxmom]

5. They're using fees everywhere to pay for the courts. Here in Oregon

any paper that has to be signed by a judge now is $10. Want to set over a hearing/trial..pay $10. Case over and want to withdraw as attorney of record...pay $10. Need an emergency hearing cause your kid wasn't returned after parenting time...pay for that, too. And the fees for filing any motion has increased dramatically as well. Those are just the family law fees that I have to deal with. The fee costs just to get a simple, uncontested divorce have gotten close to $800, without an attorney. Civil suits are even more outrageous.

[MajorChode]

6. Floriduh isn't the only state that does this

All states have LFOs. I would be surprised if Floriduh is even the highest.

[Gman2]

7. Well, Calif just makes shit up, I had a crooked cop/judge

come down on me for a made up law. Had to appeal. They will not tell you how. They say they arent allowed, Bullshit. The AG took their heads off, after my appeal called what they did Mordida

[Taitertots]

8. Why don't they tax lawyers to cover the expenses?

With a real progressive rate. Lets have high cost lawyers paying these fines. Instead of using the fines to block access to the justice system.


That would be against their goals of creating a two tiered justice system. One where the wealthy and corporations get effective legal defense, and one where the poor are blocked from legal recourse by lawyer fees and now Legal financial obligations.

[Jkid]

9. In the UK, they do the same thing.

But the HMCS (Her Majesty Court Service) is still funded by the taxpayers so the share of the court costs is much smaller and is only reserved if the person is convicted of an criminal offense.

[mntleo2]

10. I do not trust our judicial system anymore

To pay a bunch of fines to support it is a waste of time. The few that actually follow the law are rare. Most of them operate on prejudice and "guilty until proven innocent" especially for the poor.

In the juvenile justice system I have been investigating, you would be shocked. They are harvesting children from poor families for adoption. There is literally 1000% more being spent to take little kids than to give services to their families, many of them in desperate need.

I was in DC recently and found out from my legislature (who is chairperson of the Ways and Means Committee's TANF funding, Jim McDermott)the CPS and court system is so greedy, that the bottomless pit they have of Title IV-E and B entitlement money is not enough. They also go in and take about 1/3 of the TANF (welfare) monies from desperately poor mothers (most who are working for a wage) to fund themselves, their courts and CPS as well.

In the contingent I was with, one group from GA produced an internal document from the DSHS agency that urges SW to tell poor families to just give up their kids. If that does not work, they find something to accuse and just go in and take them. This is not just GA, in my state, WA it is much the same.

Again the more kids taken, the more funding gotten and the "Adoption and Foster Care Industrial Complex" remains well oiled with all the guns and money.

The last issue I struggled with in DC was around, "Well perhaps these kids are better off in upper income households ..." But the statistics say no. Kids do better if they remain in their homes and the family gets services (help with housing, food assistance, medical, etc). Jerking them out the homes they know causes huge trauma that reminas with them for the rest of their lives.

When a parent or relative is accused of child abuse, they literally have to defend themselves because they end up facing every single person, even their defense lawyer, who depends on this funding. And this funding is given based on how many kids are taken, not on how many families are preserved. So it is more lucrative to take kids than to help the families.

Oh. and btw, if relative caregivers who are not the parents (grandparents, aunts, etc) are accused of abuse whether true or not, the accusers do not have to back up their allegations legally, they can just make them. If the caregiver is poor and cannot defend themselves, this remains on their records for the rest of their life. They also do not have a right to legal defense, they have to pay for it or do it themselves against a myriad of attorneys State officials who have all the guns.

The legal defense in this country is gone. You truly ARE guilty until proven innocent" even if you are innocent.

I am *not* making any of this up. When you hear U.S. Representatives and your own state legislators admit that 1000% of the funding is going to shore up CPS and the courts to destroy families, and only 1% of it is going to help families, it hits you like a brick, "This is freaking WRONG!"

The court system is broken all across this country. My own criteria with researching the juvenile system and court judgments came from the old saying, "...follow the money ..."

My 2 cents
Cat In Seattle

P.S. I have lots of links to prove this stuff, I do not have time to post them here, but if anyone wants them, PM me and I will send them to you. There is one Progressive group in DC I have come to trust as their agenda is about real reform, and they are wonks with some real numbers: National Coalition for Child Protection Reform: http://www.nccpr.org. I have also been writing about this over at Daily Kos and Firedog Lake.

[dixiegrrrrl]

15. Kids going up for adoption?

Are these adopting families paying for the kids, I wonder?
We all know there is a black market for adopting kids.
Is there an age limit for the kids being taken? If so, a pattern would be visible.

Lastly, you do know of course 'stealing" kids for adoption to "better" families is an old
practice all over the world.

[mntleo2]

19. Yes, adoptive families pay but more ...

...it is more because of the 1000% funding to take kids coming from Title IV -E and TANF monies. I hesitate to included TANF here because it is a pittance compared to Title IV finding. The issues I take here is that TANF fuding is supposed to be used for family support, but instead is also being diverted to the Title IV funding where the people getting this funding obviously try to undermine low income families further. It is an enhancingment of even further greed by taking even from the lowest income families who love their kids too ~ and then blaming the parents for issues around their poverty. Such as "neglect" because they are homeless, have no food, or do not have medical care.

One woman, a typical case, I was in this contingent with, had to quit her job on orders from her doctor, was refused TANF help because "she made too much and "chose" to quit her job" and then when she had no resources for support with her situation lost her housing. They then came in and took her kids because she was "neglectful" as her kids went without neccessities. They charged her criminally for this and took her kids, adopted them out and now are coming after her baby.

The reason they can do this because of all this funding, which pays everyone from the file clerk to the judge, to CPS to even the "defense" attorney who are not defending the parents, they are defending the State in order to make sure everything is done "legally" to take the kids.

To give you some numbers here in my state our DSHS gets around:

$6000 every time each child is moved ~ average moves can be up to 10 times before adoption
$10,000 for a relative adoption
$20-50,000 for an outside family adoption

I am keeping this simple but adoptive parents pay for a lot of things such as:
$3-10,000 for The Adoption Study, whether used within the DSHS agency or private, either one
$5-10,000 for court costs
And any damage with the kid that is done by the State while they spent time in foster homes will be up to the family to pay for and try to repair, which often is myriad.

Here is a scam I know of within Seattle with the YWCA who also sponsors a private adoption agency:
They offer clean and sober affordable housing to desperate pregnant mothers, some with other kids after their baby is born
Their staff then report these mothers as abusive
CPS sweeps in over a matter of months and take all the kids on family at a time.
Between August of 2005-May of 2006 every single child was taken from their building in downtown Seattle.
Mothers are left to fight the allegations
If you can tell me every single one of these motehrs residing in a clean and sober building are somehow "abusive" that lived there, there are some issues ...

I am not making this crap up, I wish I were. It is depressing to listen to the mothers who are fighting for their children because they blame themselves often by saying things like, "I should not have gave directions to that man outside the building door ..." True story ~ this mother stopped and gave directions to this man who happened to be a crack dealer and then was instantly affilialted with him by a YWCA staff person who saw the exchange. When this mother was able to prove with activities she had been doing for months before she had never even seen the man and document the fact the staff themselves were present and should know she had never been affiliated with him, the "judge" dismissed her proof much of it from professionals like counselors and doctors, and said she was obviously lying. She also had passed every single drug test required to her even seeing her children, which she underwent 3 X a week. When they did not believe those tests, they took hair tests and found nothing. All information suppressed by the "judge" who arbitrarily did not want this information to come out. Then juvenile courts do not make the court and CPS records public ~ even to their accused. It goes on and on and it is heartbreaking.

I agree it is happening all around the world. That it is also happening here is sad because it is government funded. To falsely accuse innocents (and even not innocent) and then deny decent defense and consider them all innocent or not, "guilty until proven innocent" which is impossible to defend with these entitles, is impossible.

That jewelry channel billionaire woman caught taking kids from Haiti after the earthquake is a huge contributer to the non-profits who also take millions of Title IV money for American kids. The hubris is about the fact obviously (to her) she and her Chrsitian wingnut ilk are "better" for these kids than their family is. I have no doubt she was smuggling them out since, any poor to her are just not as good as she and her ilk are.

My 2 cents
Cat In Seattle

[Occulus]

16. You need to make this an OP with the links you mentioned

Now that vadawg, writedown, OMC, and the rest of the worst trolls are gone, you should have less argument on the thread if you post it. FWIW, I believe you, especially about the abuse allegation part of it. It is way too easy to get someone thrown in the slammer for decades when such allegations are made, and you're absolutely right- no actual evidence is needed at all.

[mntleo2]

20. Nobody wants to hear things about poor people

...no matter the injustice or classism involved, we poor are the ones where if anything "trickles down" it is blame for all our society's ills.

For instance there is much as crime and drug activity in upper income neighborhoods, but where are all the police? Patroling the ghetto. God forbid if some doctor's entitled son, who goes to low income immigrants and dazzles them with his famcy car to entice them to be his "runners" selling pills. Who gets the blame? Not the son who is on his way to college with Daddy's money. I witnessed this. I finally had to go to a bedazzled young Somalian teen's father and explian to him how evil his sons' "friend" was in spite of the fact this sports-car ridin' bling-man's father was head surgeon at a large hospital nearby. Fortunately they listened and simply moved to be with relatives in another state. As the father told me, "Ah yes, I know about these people, the entitled, they liked to prance around pretending they were so great for "helping" in the refugee camps when in fact they were the ones making the problems in my country ..."

I write these op-eds and ...crickets. I am not criticising anyone here, but in the Progressive community, they are not about the poor much. Oh sure they give their annual donationm to the nearest Goodwill ~ whom they do not realize are crooked themselves, using donations and public funding to pay their CEOs and other "entitles' instead of actually doing the services this money for which it should be used. Even people like me are reluctant to talk about it because with the "faith based" money and all, it merely took any questions that should be answered away from the eyes of the public and hidden on the books of the recipients.

The saddest part of all is, as we tried to warn the middle class about Welfare DeFormed, with whom the poor are the canaries in the mine as far as how far they can go to be punitive and blame the low income people they discriminate against for being ...well..discriminated against. If it works for us, it WILL move up the ladder to all but a few entitled. Now middle class people slipping down the class ladder are shocked, shocked I tell you at the fact there is nothing there for them ~ or anyone.

I will keep writing though and maybe it will be heard someplace. I could care less if I get the credit, more to raise people's conscience about what is happening.

Cat In Seattle

[Turbineguy]

13. It sounds like they got the idea

from the WWI German war reparations scheme. That worked well too.

[morningglory]

14. I was teaching a class in S. Florida 25 years ago. A student came from Alabama

and had bought a new car to drive down. It had the dealer stickers and "tag applied for" on it. He was pulled over by a Highway patrolman, who had his car towed, and took him to jail in the cruiser. On the way to jail, they encountered a flipped-over wrecked car in the side ditch. The patrolman took a look, reported the wreck. Two occupants were dead. He said "they won't be needing this any more", and emptied their wallets of all cash. Right in front of the citizen he had under arrest. A citizen who was legally driving a car that was in process of being registered, who was going to spend a lot of money and a miserable weedend before class. I have always hoped that he had the guy's badge number and a good lawyer back in his home state. I live in a hell-hole.

[Heywood J]

17. Do they make you pay for the bullet too? (nt)

[Roon]

18. Always demand a jury trial

Make your case the most expensive you can make it. They will drop it if it's less than a felony. I have beat a pot charge and a hefty traffic ticket by doing this.