Thomas' opinion would seem to point to a "great" way for small municipalities and courts to raise money.
Just pull people over for no reason whatsoever, give them a ticket for "enforcement goal of the week," and collect the fines as most people will pay it. If anyone eventually disputes and wins, the local govt still gets to keep the money, since they at some point in time "justly" stood guilty.
Or arrest and convict people of jaywalking, or any other made up charge. As long as you have a judge that will go along with this (the communities in and near Ferguson MO are an example), it's a "great" way to collect money. Just convict them, no matter what.
As civil forfeiture is increasingly scrutinized, it will not surprise me if streamlined convictions and 1 day "time served" sentences become common along lonely stretches of Interstate 80. "There, we fixed it."
If you can "just" convict people of anything no matter what, we probably have bigger problems.
Not that I particularly agree with Thomas, but assuming that it's trivially easy to convict anyone you want of a criminal offense is quite a big leap. (And it doesn't just require a compliant judge -- people could always ask for jury trials).
> The Justice Department's report said Brockmeyer approved the creation of additional fees, "many of which are widely considered abusive and may be unlawful, including several that the City has repealed during the pendency of our investigation. These include a $50 fee charged each time a person has a pending municipal arrest warrant cleared."
> Just about every branch of Ferguson government -- police, Municipal Court, City Hall -- participated in "unlawful" targeting of African-American residents for tickets and fines, the Justice Department concluded.
It looks like it was trivially easy to come up with any scheme they wanted to collect money from people too vulnerable and poor to fight it. If the Michael Brown shooting hadn't happened, the area wouldn't have received the scrutiny it did, and my assumption is that the scheme would still be ongoing. I'm sure this happens elsewhere; the smaller the community and the more chummy the players, the easier it would be.
I'm sympathetic to the idea that we have structural racism in a lot of places, including the justice system. But trying to combat that by worrying about whether later-exonerated convicts get some of their fees back is like worrying about the amount of scarring caused by a decapitation.
And this case was about people who had gone through entire non-trivial justice system processes for non-trivial crimes, were convicted, and later had those convictions overturned. It's not about fines and speeding tickets.
But it would be about those trivial things as it gets implemented down in the smaller communities. That's the point: if an opinion like Thomas' held in the large, it would make it easier to get away with trivial things in the small. It degrades justice, at the core and at the edges.
Thomas' opinion is very strictly based on the idea that there was once a legal conviction, that was then overturned. That's not something that happens very much in the legal system, and it particularly doesn't happen very much for the small annoying offenses like traffic violations that you're talking about, because it's just not worth the time and effort to overturn them.
He didn't say, "It's cool to fine someone absent a conviction, and then when or if they successfully avoid a conviction, do not give them back their money."
It happens a lot with parking and traffic offenses. "You will be assumed to be guilty and lose the right of appeal if you do not respond to this within x amount of time."
Yep this. In Thomas's world, local government would fast track petty convictions to continue to fleece us. It would incentivize terrible things like you mention.
Not to mention, perverse incentives would instantly appear like cops worried about their pensions and budget planting evidence on people for convictions. Nice car you got there, shame I found cocaine in it. Now it belongs to the state because a plea is better than $50,000 in lawyer fees to fight a corrupt police department you probably can't even beat. Even if you could, spending $50,000 to save a car worth $10,000 doesn't make sense.
Just pull people over for no reason whatsoever, give them a ticket for "enforcement goal of the week," and collect the fines as most people will pay it. If anyone eventually disputes and wins, the local govt still gets to keep the money, since they at some point in time "justly" stood guilty.
Or arrest and convict people of jaywalking, or any other made up charge. As long as you have a judge that will go along with this (the communities in and near Ferguson MO are an example), it's a "great" way to collect money. Just convict them, no matter what.
As civil forfeiture is increasingly scrutinized, it will not surprise me if streamlined convictions and 1 day "time served" sentences become common along lonely stretches of Interstate 80. "There, we fixed it."