Our team lost at trial in our class-action lawsuit challenging pretrial fees in Ravalli County, Montana. It’s a sentence I hoped I would never write, and one that, as trial prep and trial commenced throughout the last few months, I firmly believed I’d never have to. What began as a lawsuit with a handful of named plaintiffs back in August of 2021 evolved over the course of nearly five years into something bigger than our individual plaintiffs, bigger than Equal Justice Under Law, and bigger than Ravalli County.

At their core, these newest executive orders are thinly-veiled attempts to criminalize poverty, and the fallout will be felt hardest by communities of color. The Constitutional promise of equal justice under the law is clear, and there can be no equal justice when people’s ability to access pretrial freedom depends on the depth of their pockets.

Today, Equal Justice Under Law filed a Complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia challenging the state’s unconstitutional foster care fees scheme that charges exorbitant and arbitrary fees to parents living in poverty whose children are in foster care. The lawsuit alleges that Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) removed children from more than 700 families between 2018 and 2022 solely for reasons of poverty, and then turned around and charged parents of those same families unaffordable monthly child support amounts which served to further delay or altogether prevent family reunification.

Last month, Equal Justice Under Law filed an appeal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in an effort to keep our lawsuit challenging wealth-based driver’s license suspensions alive.