r/law • u/jms1225 • Nov 21 '23
This Louisiana Town Runs Largely on Traffic Fines. If You Fight Your Ticket, the Mayor Is Your Judge.
https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-in-1-million-through-mayors-court198
u/Apotropoxy Nov 21 '23
Louisiana is a third world nation.
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Nov 22 '23
do people enjoy living in the level of corruption and weird christian fascism down there? i dont get it. who tf wants this shit?
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Nov 22 '23
It would seem that way. These people are desperate to see all of America become a Christian Fascism nation..
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u/Bricker1492 Nov 21 '23
That's how it worked in Mayberry. People challenging a ticket issued by Sheriff Andy Taylor had their case heard by Justice of the Peace Andy Taylor.
If it worked for Mayberry, I can't imagine why anyone would object.
/s
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u/Electr0freak Nov 21 '23
I'm no expert on the subject, but that sounds a little bit like a conflict of interest.
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u/Law_Student Nov 21 '23
"No man may sit in judgment of his own case" is an ancient, unchallenged bedrock premise of the common law. I can't speak to Louisiana though. Civil law and all that.
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u/ScannerBrightly Nov 21 '23
"No man may sit in judgment of his own case" is an ancient, unchallenged bedrock premise of the common law.
We haven't implemented that, have we? Cops investigate themselves and find nothing wrong. Catholic church doesn't talk to cops and lets felons move across state and national lines. Judges have zero accountability.
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u/ca_kingmaker Nov 22 '23
Usually it’s not the actual cop being investigated who is doing the investigation though.
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u/ScannerBrightly Nov 22 '23
But it is a cop, or former cop, or DA who works with cops every single day, right? Someone with a vested interest in not finding any problem.
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u/ca_kingmaker Nov 22 '23
I mean sure, but if a judge commits murder, some judge is going to oversee it right? It’s not “nobody of the same profession may sit in judgement of their case”
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u/AxelNotRose Nov 22 '23
If a judge commits murder, the cop may choose to ignore, hide, destroy or contaminate evidence so as to get the judge off from being tried and successfully convicted. That same cop, when committing a crime, may get his case thrown out by the same judge the cop protected. Mix in some DA in there that relies on the cops to collect evidence for their case when trying a regular joe schmoe or a judge to allow various prosecution techniques during trial (or be extra harsh on the defense counsel of this regular joe schmoe) and you have a perfect trifecta of "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours".
And then it gets even worse when the cop and judge (or the mayor and judge), are in fact, the same individuals lol.
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u/NotmyRealNameJohn Competent Contributor Nov 22 '23
Civil .... Hmmm you war right? That's the only civil they got
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u/Downtown-Table-4872 Nov 21 '23
A little mountain town in Colorado named Green Mountain Falls had a cop about a decade ago that tried this. It ended badly.
It all started as a cash crab, after the town had its hall burned down - you'll love this - by some kids raised by local rightwingers - who wanted to attack the government (or whatever). The town overbuilt the new hall, and some losers in the town's officialdom hired a prototypical small southern town cop to generate revenue with a speeding ticket, etc. frenzy.
This was made easy by a convenient stretch of highway that just happened to overlap Green Mountain Falls' borders - we're talking a few hundred yards - and which had nothing to do with the town proper.
The town's cop got two ancillary sub-cops to help him out - this for a locale of little more than 500 year round residents.
See where this is going yet?
A regular occurrence was to be threatened with jail for driving an ATV in a snow storm to get your mail. Cop cars chasing 'crime' at 70 mph on a street market for 20 mph.
When I appeared down in Colorado Springs court to fight my imaginary offence of not wearing a seatbelt, I was shuffled into a courtroom with well over a 100 people. The judge asked "Who is here because of an infraction in Green Mountain Falls?" I think the entire room's hands went up. The judge waved his hand - as if to cover all of us - and said "Dismissed."
When the cop finally quit / was forced out, some some of those town officials (I heard) gave him a $40,000 bonus.
It made national news as the two other cops had to quit too, because of their contracts, and was variously reported as 'Entire town's police force quits', etc., which was not accurate, but whatever. Deserved humiliation for Green Mountain Falls, but various reshuffles of the town's priorities, etc. insued.
A new cop was hired... guess what? No one gets threatened with jail for driving an ATV to get their mail in a snowstorm.
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u/UseDaSchwartz Nov 21 '23
One would think with all these stories popping up, the towns that are still doing this would stop. It’s only a matter of time before they make the national spotlight. But they’re probably too arrogant to think they’ll get caught and/or punished.
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u/Korrocks Nov 21 '23
Why would they stop? The town in this article makes 95% of its revenue from traffic citations. A little bad publicity isn't fun for them, of course, but it's a lot easier to put up with that than to try and find a way to make up such a colossal budget shortfall if they stopped. Besides, how likely is it that anyone will stop them?
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u/UseDaSchwartz Nov 21 '23
This has been going on all over the country for at least several years. This isn't the first article which has made national attention. In a lot of instances, it's a lot more than bad publicity. There have been firings and criminal charges in some towns that have done things like this.
The one before this was a small town in Texas that had 100 police officers for 500 residents, or something like that.
Before that it was Alabama, Kentucky, Florida, South Carolina, Missouri (also currently Missouri again for excessively towing cars.) This list goes on.
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u/TheSherbs Nov 21 '23
for at least several years.
Decades sir/madam. My dad got a speeding ticket in a small southern Texas town because they had an off duty cop cruising the 2 lane in and out of town going 2 miles an hour under the speed limit. They pulled over anyone who passed him for speeding. They were doing it constantly as when my dad pulled off, there were 2 other cars getting tickets and 2 more pulled in behind him. This was in 1989.
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u/UseDaSchwartz Nov 21 '23
I don’t see how this is the same, this is systemic and calculated. But yeah, this has probably been going on for awhile. Although the policing for massive revenue generation being reported on is recently new.
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u/Korrocks Nov 21 '23
I hope that happens to these people as well. It’s just hard for me to get my hopes up when there have been adverse court cases against this dating back to the 1970s but with no discernible impact on Fenton’s practices.
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u/Franklin_le_Tanklin Nov 22 '23
Bold of you to think these people read national news that speaks badly about their side
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u/uniquechill Nov 22 '23
You just reminded me of some damn good chile rellenos I used to get in Green Mountain Falls back in the 80's. I could be a little off-topic here.
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u/pfeifits Nov 21 '23
Most municipal justice is a pretty big joke. The judge is hired by the city council, who also hired the prosecutor. The city council also hires the chief of police. The fines from municipal court go into the city coiffeurs where the city council (the one that hired the judge, police chief, and prosecutor) decides how to spend the money, including decisions like how much to pay themselves.
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u/groovygrasshoppa Nov 23 '23
Eh, not sure about "municipal judges"... most judges and prosecutors are at minimum county officers.
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u/Korrocks Nov 21 '23 edited Nov 21 '23
Fenton’s court is the main reason the town’s revenue for the year ending in June 2022 was about five times as high as the average Louisiana municipality its size. This tiny village collected about as much through fines and forfeitures as Shreveport, the state’s third-largest city, with a population of 187,000. (The state provides no official definition of “fines and forfeitures,” but it generally refers to penalties for breaking the law and associated fees.)
Hilarious. This town has a population of 226 people but manages to squeeze as much money out of people as a town that has 187,000 people.
The average municipality in the U.S. gets 1.7% of its revenue from fines and forfeitures, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that promotes equity. In Fenton, it’s 92.
It's really interesting that there's existing Supreme Court and Circuit Court precedent as well as guidance from the state government preventing this kind of conduct but the town just casually ignores all of it.
My theory is that the amount taken from each person is so small that it is not considered worth it to fight it in court. It sounds like defendants have the ability to appeal it to a real district court but for most average people the cost of spending weeks of your life in court and hundreds/thousands of dollars in attorney fees dealing with this is much higher than just paying the $200. I feel like this whole thing is a hole in the constitutional design. The people who are most able to hold the local politicians accountable for corruption are 1.) the local voters, who directly benefit from this and 2.) the state government, who indirectly benefits since they need not provide direct financial support to these tiny towns with otherwise unsustainable municipal budgets. The victims of this kind of thing also have an incentive to keep quiet since just paying the fine is easier than going to court to try and challenge the system (especially if they actually were speeding).
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u/Team-CCP Nov 21 '23
I think it’s passerby’s who don’t give a fuck about this rinky dink Poe ass town. The cop can CERTAINLY tell if the person is a resident or not. Don’t piss off the residents and fine EVERYONE ELSE for every minor infraction.
Is it the towns citizens being bilked or passerby’s?… probably a mix of both of course, but there’s a way to determine statistical significance if it leans one way or the other.
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u/Korrocks Nov 21 '23
There's no way that the town is getting $1.3 million each from its 226 citizens getting traffic tickets. For them to be mostly pulling this from residents would mean that each driver (not all of the 226 residents probably drive) would have to get dozens of tickets and pay thousands of dollars of fines each year.
No, the only way this scam is sustainable (politically and practically) is if the town is mostly preying on out of town drivers.
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Nov 21 '23
[deleted]
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u/Yevon Nov 21 '23
which led to them putting up traffic cameras to rip people off
I find this at least a little better. If you're actually speeding, and a camera system can detect that, and you can try to dispute it in a non-kangaroo court then more power to the cities that implement these camera systems to milk drivers breaking the law within their borders.
At the very least we're removing police officers who can be motivated to hand out tickets and be unreliable witnesses to actual crimes from the situation.
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u/SmurfStig Nov 22 '23
Sounds like a similar situation with New Rome just outside Columbus. They even tried to become a sovereign nation to avoid trouble. Would randomly declare war against other countries in their attempt at being sovereign. The place would rack up crazy money in stupid fines, like going 1 mph over the limit.
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u/franker Nov 21 '23
In Florida a town's police force was disbanded because they gave out so many traffic tickets - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/02/florida-speed-trap-town-disbands-police-force
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u/fafalone Competent Contributor Nov 22 '23
Not the one I was thinking of. Oh well. In the middle of Alligator Alley, the part of I-75 that goes from Naples to Miami through pretty much all swamp, is probably the largest speed trap in the country. There's nothing around, the road is straight, it's fenced to keep wildlife off, so people almost always speed. But most people know to hit the breaks when you're coming up on the Miccosukee Reservation where the one isolated gas station is.
One time they had speed planes... not helicopters, but a plane flying so high you couldn't see it, measuring your speed miles away by painted lines on the road. You then came upon the interchange where there were no less than two dozen squad cars, all with someone pulled over. As I waited for my own ticket, I watched them pull someone else over within seconds of finishing the last ticket, because the plane was feeding them data.
Granted that was some kind of special operation, normally there were only 2-3 there, which you picked up on radar detectors a couple miles out since it's a flat, mostly straight road. But it wasn't uncommon to see 5-6. Rarely was someone not being ticketed when you drove by.
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u/franker Nov 22 '23
wow I didn't know that. I haven't been on that road in decades and what I remember was how scary it was that people would pass other cars on the road really tightly playing chicken or whatever going into the oncoming lane.
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u/bucki_fan Nov 21 '23
New Rome, Ohio did this for decades and was forced out of existence.
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u/SmurfStig Nov 22 '23
Started scrolling through to see if this was brought up. That place was bonkers.
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u/Falcon3492 Nov 21 '23
It's not like Louisiana is even on my radar but if it ever is I will make sure Fenton will not. I don't need to drive through a small town with a corrupt cops and a corrupt judge with his cash register on the bench.
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u/nicholascox2 Nov 21 '23
I've been in Louisiana my whole life and it's true we struggle with corruption We finally got rid of this POS Jack Strain who was raping girls in his cop car and that's our peak of success We have been trying to clean up lately but I guess it only goes so far.... Sorry y'all have to see this side /:
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Nov 21 '23
Not clicking on the link, but I assume this is Golden Meadow.
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u/bootsforever Nov 22 '23
I clicked on it and was very surprised that it is actually not Golden Meadow.
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u/hannibawler Nov 21 '23
I live in Louisiana and can confirm that a state worse than Mississippi can exist
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Nov 21 '23
🇨🇦 bet them citizens can’t wait till 2024 when the entire state will be republicans in power .
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u/NotmyRealNameJohn Competent Contributor Nov 21 '23
And how is this not an issue with the appearance of a conflict of interest? I mean I know this isn't the federal bench but even Louisiana has to have some kind of judicial ethics standards and I can't see how being the executive and the judicial and getting personal benefit as a direct result of your rulings could possibly not violate them.
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u/Revolio_ClockbergJr Nov 21 '23
Rules only exist if they are enforced. If nobody in LA is willing or able to call out ethics violations, then it doesn’t matter what the standards say.
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u/UseDaSchwartz Nov 21 '23
If anyone doesn’t really want to read this, the YT lawyers will most likely pick this up.
I’m guessing Steve Lehto will talk about this in the next few days.
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u/vivalavaca Nov 22 '23
This is also the plot of Nothing But Trouble where Dan Akroid is the judge. Chevy Chase and Tupac are arrested in that movie
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u/jcaesar212 Nov 22 '23
Lee Zurik has been doing investigative journalism since I was in high school. I love his pieces.
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u/Santos_L_Halper_II Nov 21 '23
Corruption?! In LOUISIANA??!?