Equal Justice Under Law Heads to Trial in Montana Lawsuit Challenging Absuive Pre-Trial Fees
On March 9th, Equal Justice Under Law will be going to trial in the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana challenging Ravalli County, Montana’s unconstitutional pretrial supervision fees. Ravalli County, which borders Missoula County, charges exorbitant fees to low-income individuals just for them to stay out of jail before they go to trial. In Ravalli County, pretrial arrestees – who have not been found guilty of the crime for which they have been arrested – are required to pay various pretrial supervision fees up to $1,000 per month. If the arrestees are unable to pay, Ravalli County can deny them pretrial services like drug testing and GPS monitoring – which can lead to an arrest – effectively using jail as a threat to force them to pay and creating a modern-day debtors' prison. Even when charges are dismissed or an individual is found innocent at trial, the fees are not reimbursed.
Equal Justice Under Law initially filed a lawsuit against Ravalli County, Montana on behalf of a plaintiffs’ class of indigent arrestees, challenging their “Jail Diversion Program,” a division of the County’s Sheriff’s Office. After surviving a motion to dismiss, a judge largely denied the County’s motion for summary judgment, finding material disputes of fact on five of the plaintiffs’ counts. After more than four years of litigation, the case is going to trial to determine whether Ravalli County violated due process or falsely imprisoned indigent individuals in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment and Montana state law.
The evidence Equal Justice Under Law has uncovered shows an incredibly harmful picture. Most arrestees in Ravalli County are assigned to “pretrial supervision” and additional “monitoring conditions” such as alcohol monitoring, or GPS tracking. While judges assign bail amounts and bail conditions, they do not assign the fees the Jail Diversion Program charges to provide the conditions, nor do the judges even know how much these fees will be. Unlike bail, these fees are not challengeable in court, individuals’ ability to pay is not considered, and the fees are not returned at any point, even if the arrestee is found innocent. If an individual cannot pay the hundreds of dollars per month, they may be denied their court-ordered pretrial services, and their bail could be revoked. The result is a system where pretrial freedom — which is supposed to be the norm in the American criminal justice system — is conditioned on the ability to pay fees set by the Sheriff’s Office.
Ravalli County is not alone in assessing pre-trial fees for supervision and monitoring, and most states explicitly authorize electronic monitoring fees for individuals pre-trial. The difference is that many jurisdictions either provide pretrial services directly through the judicial system (meaning fees are court-ordered and due process is necessarily guaranteed), or they rely on private companies to provide services. Outsourcing pretrial services to private companies can lead to separate constitutional violations, but does often prevent the conflicts of interest that arise in places like Ravalli County, where the same entity arresting individuals is profiting off of every arrest. Indeed, Equal Justice Under Law plan to show at trial that Ravalli County has made profit from charging these fees, and the alternative – indigent individuals sitting in jail because they cannot afford fees – both flies in the face of justice, and would cost the County more than simply covering the pre-trial monitoring costs. Many jurisdictions, including Washington, D.C. where Equal Justice Under Law is based, and Missoula County, which borders Ravalli County, have readily acknowledged this fact, and provide pretrial services at no cost to the arrestee for at least some amount of time during the pretrial period.
This case implicates the "invidiousness of the discrimination that exists when criminal procedures are made available only to those who can pay,” announced in Mayer v Chicago, a more than 50-year-old Supreme Court case, and goes to the very heart of core constitutional principles. The right to freedom from imprisonment is fundamental to the justice system and due process. So too is the principle of equal justice. Ravalli County’s pretrial fees violate these fundamental principles, by conditioning freedom on payment, effectively treating poverty itself as a crime.
At trial, Equal Justice Under Law will seek to hold Ravalli County accountable, end this wealth-based justice system, and change how people are treated in Ravalli County going forward. While this lawsuit is rooted in Ravalli County, the case has broader implications for what process is due to people in the justice system nationwide, especially before trial. Equal Justice Under Law was founded on the principle that being poor is not a crime, and we will continue to fight in Ravalli County and around the country to ensure that this principle is universally upheld. To learn more about this lawsuit, visit our website.